PARTIAL RECALL BY T H E SAME AUTHOR
Poetrv Nine Enclosures Distance in Statute Miles Middle Earth The Trilnsfiguring Places
Translations The Absent Traveller: Prakrit LOZJC Poetry from the Girhisaptaiati ofsatavahana Hala Songs of Kabir
Edited Books Twenq Indian Poems The Oxford India Anthology of Tiir,elz~eModern Indian Poets Periplus: Poetry in Translation (with Daniel Weissbort) A n Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English The Last Bungalow: Writings on Allahabad Collected Poems i n English by Arun Kolatkar
Essays on Literature and Literary History
Published by P E R M A N E N T BLACK
'Hirnalayana', Mall Road, Ranikhet Cantt, Ranikhet 263645
[email protected] Distributed by O R I E N T BLACKSWAN PRIVATE LTD
Bangalore Bhopal Bhubaneshwar Chandigarh Chennai Ernakulam Guwahati Hyderabad Jaipur Kolkata Lucknow Mumbai New Delhi Patna
ISBN 81-7824-3 10-5
Typeset in Agararnond by Guru Typograph Technology, Dwarka, New Delhi 110075 Printed and bound by Sapra Brothers, New Delhi 110092
for
Vandana and Palash
Contents
Introduction
Descendants Partial Recall Death of a Poet Mela
II The Bradman Class The Emperor Has No Clothes Towards a History of Indian Literature in English Looking for A.K. Ramanujan Street Music: A Brief History
What is an Indian Poem? Translating Kabir
Bibliographical Note
Introduction
B r ~ a d l ~ s p e a k i nmy g , two preoccupations in the essays that follow have been the nature of the multilingual imagination and the invisible web of connections that lies beneath a literature, the stories that are hidden behind tHe stories we read. The two preoccupations, which really are one, are guided less by a desire to interpret the pattern in the carpet than to understand how it came to acquire the shape it did. While my writerly soul has travelled through realms of gold, the body, for at least part of the time, has been immured in Allahabad. Three of the essays, 'Descendants', 'Partial Recall', and 'Mela', are glimpses into this other world that I've inhabited. 'Towards a History of Indian Literature in English' ends with the examples ofwriters who, when they looked in the mirror in the hallway, saw more than their own smiling faces staring back at them. I. Allan Sealy saw Henry Derozio, Nirad Chaudhuri saw Toru Dutt, Salman Rushdie saw G.V. Desani. I had hoped that the awareness of their precursors shown by these writers would lead critics to explore the idea further. A decade after writing the essay
I realize that this was wishful thinking on my part. A literarylandscape is made up of much more than isolated works of literature; it requirescritical scrutiny, intelligent encouragement, and credible evaluation, but there is such a scarcity of these that the Indian one looks more barren than ever before. If there are any productive
2
Partial Recall
intellectual communities living in the scrub, whether nomadic or settled, freelancers or attached to universities, they've kept themselves well hidden from view. The great betrayal of our literature has been primarily by those who teach in the country's English departments, thc academic community whose job it was to green the hillsides by planting them with biographies, scholarly editions, selections carrying new introductions, histories, canon-shaping (orcanon-brealung) anthologies, readable translations, revaluations, exhaustive bibliographies devoted to individual authors, and critical essays that, because of the excellence of their prose, become as much a part of the literatureas any significant novel or poem. Little ofthis has happened. Writers die, are mourned by other writers, and the matter ends there. A year goes by, then a decade, and nothing appears to tell the reading public why the author deserves to be read and how he fitted into the larger story of a literature to which he spent a lifetime contributing. Whether it's Srinivas Rayaprol, or Nissim Ezekiel, or A.K. Ramanujan, or Dom Moraes, or Arun Kolatkar, orAgha Shahid Ali, or G.S. Sharat Chandra, or Gopal Honnalgere, or Kamala Das, or Dilip Chitre, to mention only the poets, the story's been the same. And the dead writer is now rwice dead. Ifwe can't read or rediscover our contemporaries, what chance of doing this for our classics? 'Intelligent criticism may be said to be a thing unknown to the Native Press', bemoaned Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya in 'A Popular Literature for Bengal' (1870): There is some inherent defect in the Bengali character which renders the task of distinguishing the beautiful and the true from the gaudy and the false a task of even greater difficulty than the higher effort of creation. This deficiency in the culture of the cultivated Bengali reacts on the literature. The blundering critic often passes a verdict,
Introduction
3
which, if he happens to be an authority accustomed to command respect on literary matters, misleads by its error and strikes at the root of all excellence. A year later the subject was still on his mind, only this time he broadened the scope of the attack: But while books and newspapers aredaily pouring from the press, the quality of our current literature is by no means proportioned to its bulk. In fact, by far the greatest part [of]what is published is absolute rubbish. There are several modern Bengali books of which we shall have to speak in terms of high pyaise, but the number of these is so small in comparison with the mass of publications yearly vomiced forth by the Bengali press, that they go but a little way towards redeeming the character of the whole. . . .The case ofcriticism is worse. We can hardly hope for a healthy and vigorous Bengali literature in the utter absence of anything like intelligent criticism. ('Bengali Literature') What Bankim said about the state of Bengali literature in 1870 could be said about many Indian literatures, particularly the one in English, in 20 1 1. Books continue to daily pour from the press and some of them are reviewed. The reviews here, unlike reviews elsewhere, seldom connect the title to anything that's been done previously in that genre by others or by the same author. Reading them, you'd think that the book had emerged from a litkrary nowhere, which it hasn't, though headed for nowhere, 'in the utter absence of anything like intelligent criticism', it certainly is. The first few weeks in which the reviews appear are, for the book, like the first few weeks of a newborn's life. This is the period of rampant infanticide, a time when books are killed not by hostile reviews but by meaningless ones. This happens all the time. The review of an Oriya novel in the literary section of The Hindu of 6 August
4
Partial Recall
2006 began: 'The English translation of this first fruit from the late flowering tree of Oriya prose allows a peek into Oriya novel's Darwinian past.'And it continued: 'In an opening that is strikingly unusual for its time, a wealthy young man with raging hormones sees an exquisitely beautiful 16-year-old maiden . . .' My favourite babu sentence though is not by an English professor from Bhubaneswar but a Delhi journalist who began his review of Naipaul's collection of essays The Writer a n d His World thus: 'The heart of darkness beats o n the pacemaker of history' (India Today, 1 6 September 2002). T h e decline of the English sentence is n o laughing matter, but say that to an Indian and he'll look at you asquint. (Indian art critics are n o better than Indian book reviewers. Meera Devidayal's catalogue of her 2009 painting exhibition in Bombay contains the following gem: 'She [Devidayall has opened u p the fractal that is Bombay and immersed herself in the lattices of its constituencies.') T h e thought never seems to have crossed the minds of these reviewers that the function of language is to communicate. In his 'Letter to Humayun', which appears towards the end of his heartbreaking memoir which we know as The Baburnama, the first Mughal emperor touches o n many things, among them the importance of clarity in writing: As I asked, you have written your letters, but you didn't read them over, for if you had had a mind to read them, you would have found that you could not. After reading them you certainly would have changed them. Although your writing can be read with difficulty, i t is excessively obscure. Who has ever heard of prose being enigmatic? Your spelling is not bad, although it is not entirely correct either. You wrote iltifat with the wrong t; you wrote qulinj with a y. Your handwriting can be made out somehow or other, but with all these obscure words of yours the meaning is not entirely clear. Probably
Introduction
5
your laziness in writing letters is due to the fact that you try to make it too fancy. From now on write with uncomplicated, clear, and plain words. This will cause less difficulty both for you and your reader. (Translation by Wheeler M. Thackston) T h e lesson is hard to escape: great empires-or modest literary cultures-are not built on a foundation of muddled prose. 'They all wrote; some wrote well', Gore Vidal says in his essay o n 'Robert Graves and the Twelve Caesars'. 'Julius Caesar and Augustus were distinguished prosewriters; each preferred plain old-fashioned Latin. Augustus particularly disliked what he called the "Asiatic" style, favored by, among others', his rival Marc Antony, whose speeches he found imprecise and "stinking offar-fetched phrases".' After the reviews stinking of far-fetched, not to say Asiatic, phrases; after that very Indian tamasha, the book launch, which is part Monsoon Wedding and part Irish wake; after the initial print run of 1100 or 2000 copies is exhausted, the book drops out of sight. T h e sad part comes now, for the book, however good it may be, stands little chance of being remembered again, whether in essay, anthology, or history. It becomes part of the scrub. But d o a poll today and ask the Indian reading public whether it is happy with the state of affairs and you'll get a high percentage of yeses. Were there a literary happiness index, Indians would be at the top, the happiest people in the world: instead of the writing, all the focus seems to be o n the advances a few authors get, the Man Bookers they win, the festivals they attend, the number of European languages they get translated into. T h e reading public is not complaining. Come to think of it, neither are the jet-lagged authors, even as they watch their life's work disappear into critical oblivion. Through all this, sitting behind editorial desks, goggles pushed back above hairline, plump women go about their business,
6
Partial Recall
efficiently running their clubby magazines and journals, their heads lost in a great cloud of amnesia. There's always a new book to review or send out for review or an appealingly young Pakistani writer to meet; it's a pleasant enough life. While the women pictured above are wholly real, as are the magazines they run, ours still remains a literature in search of one. It's a literature without a serious literary magazine. It has to be said though that even if one existed and the editor (our Barbara Epstein in a Dacca sari) wanted to commission an essay (4000 words), where would she find her Susan Sontag? Dehra Dun
January 20 1 1
Descendants
'He was courteous to a fault and spoke beautiful English', is how someone who was one of his students in the early 1970s described him. s 'What did he teach?' I asked. 'Shakespeare.' 'What was he like as a teacher?' 'I can't say.' 'Why?' 'Because he seldom came to class. Well, he came a few times and then gave us a long list of things to read, Caroline Spurgeon, G. Wilson Knight, M.C. Bradbrook, you know what I mean. The next we heard he had left for Holland, to teach in a school there. He had a droll sense of humour.' Arun Kumar Bhattacharya was a short, compact, neat-looking man. He had a bald head with a fringe of grey hair and a round, pleasant face. Occasionally, I would run into him in the English Department of Allahabad University, where we both taught. H e was twenty years older than me, but that was not why we did not have much' to say to each other. There was something prickly about him, and I kept my distance. I always noticed, though, that Bhattacharya took great care over his appearance. His cotton shirts, even at the end of a hot day, looked freshly laundered, and his expensive leather sandals, it seemed, were dust-repellent. H e
10
Partial Recall
lived in a yellow and white bungalow at the corner of Thornhill and Albert Road, and drove an Ambassador car, which, more so since he was often its only occupant, appeared to be too big for him, like an oversized jacket. He was a bachelor. Though Bhattacharya had spent most of his life in Allahabad, he was not a native of the city. Unknown even perhaps to himself, he was part of a long migration that had brought increasing numbers of Bengalis, mainly, but other communities as wellKashmiri Pandits, Gujarati Nagars, a few entrepreneurial Parsisto Gangetic upcountry towns in the second half of the nineteenth century. What drew these people to places like Patna, Allahabad, and Cawnpore were the new opportunities in education and medicine, business and trade, the administration and the judiciary, opened up, ironically, by colonialism. T h e 'British Empire was the empire of Steam', Jan Morris has remarked, but though built as part of the infrastructure of colonialism and staffed chiefly by Anglo-Indians, the railways were crucial to this Indian migration.
T h e colonial city of Allahabad, the area today known as Civil Lines, stands on the site of eight villages, which the British, to teach the natives a lesson, razed to the ground after the Mutiny of 1857. 'Helpless women, with suckling ififants at their breasts, felt the weight of our vengeance no less than the vilest malefactors', wrote a historian of the Mutiny of events in the city. And one British officer spoke of his day's work thus: One trip I enjoyed amazingly; we got on board a steamer with a gun, while the Sikhs and the fusiliers marched up to the city. We steamed up throwing shots right and left till we got up to the bad places. when we went on the shore and peppered away with our guns, my own old double-barrel bringing down several niggers.
Descendants
11
In 1858, the year in which the governance of India passed from the East India Company to the Crown, the capital of the North-Western Provinces shifted from Agra to Allahabad. The changes to Allahabad which this brought about would have seemed dramatic to its inhabitants at the time. A significant rise in building construction followed an increase in the town's population, particularly around 1870. In the space of little more than a decade, centuries of isolation gave way to cosmopolitanism; village settlements to city roads and parks, tower clocks and spires, bandstands and covered markets, gymkhana clubs and newspaper offices, law courts and colleges, hospitals and libraries. To the rural sounds of belled cattle returning home was added the rattle ofthe latest printing machines of the Pioneer Press and the ping of the shuttlecock from a game of badminton in progress in the gardens of Belvedere House, described by a late-nineteenthcentury resident as 'a famous old bungalow which [had] been standing since the Mutiny days of 1857.' Belvedere House is where, in 1888, Rudyard Kipling wrote his short story 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep' and which, later, he recalled in 'Kkki-Tikki-Tavi'. New service quarters (mohullas)-Allengunj near the university, Lukergunj near the railway station-came up to accommodate the growing population, and even today if one goes there one gets the feeling that one has come to a different part of the country. T h e shop signs are in Bengali and banner ads for Ranga-Java Deluxe Sindur hang outside. T h e Kashmiri Pandits had no mohulla of their own, but that is because many of them were vakils, lawyers who had made enough money on the High Court Bar to live more grandly. In the 1880s one of them, Ajudhia Nath Kunzru, was earning something like Rs 80,000 a year from his practice alone. Sir Tej Bahadur Saprui palatial house on Albert Road has been torn down, and so has Kailash Nath Katju's on Edmonstone Road, but Motilal Nehrui
Partial Recall Anand Bhavan still stands, a two-storey white building with a colonnaded verandah running round it. Judging by the standards of the time, it is not very large, nor is it ostentatious in the same way that contemporary Bania- or Punjabi-Gothic is. Motilal appears to have been a man of taste. In Civil Lines, where initially only the British could occupv the bungalows, some of the best business establishments were Parsi-owned. Guzders was a bar and restaurant, T. Shaporjee & Sons was a general merchant's, C.D. Motishaw and Co. a car and motorcycle showroom, and J.M. Patell described itself as 'Photographers and Artists'. Opposite the High Court was Hotel Finaro. Owned by Rhoda Gandhi, it has been home to many generations of British and American researchers who have come to Allahabad to consult the Regional Archives after Independence or work in the Record Rooms ofthe High Court, the Commissioner's Office, or the Municipal Board.
Descendants Rustam said, 'If you want to know about Allahabad Parsis, you should go and see Meher Dhondy. She knows much more than I do. Moreover, she has many interesting things in her house. Her father was the photographer J.M. Patell, and she may even have some old photographs. We don't have anything like that in the Finaro, not even old hotel guest registers.' I asked him ifhe remembered any of the guests who had stayed in the Finaro. 'I got to know Professor J.B. Harrison from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London quite well. He would be 8 here for months at a time, working away in the municipality on the history of Allahabad's sanitation system. We have been in touch off and on. I also remember Gillian Buckee, who was working on the High Court. But I've no idea where she is now.'
I had heard of Meher Dhondy. She used to teach in the Girls'
From the road, which was once Hastings Road and is now Nyaya Marg, the small six-room Hotel Finaro looks like someone's house. One of Allahabad's few remaining colonial bungalows, one part of it is still a private residence. Rhoda Gandhi's son Rustam now lives there. He runs the hotel, in addition to managing his manufacturing business. A heavily built man in his mid sixties with a broad forehead and a lumbering walk, Rustam was wearing a bright chequered shirt and navy-blue trousers when I met him. We sat in the verandah, where the only furniture was some straight-backed chairs, two of which we occupied. The ambience could not have been more unhotel-like.
High School and now gives English lessons at home. Her classes are much in demand. She was probably in her seventies but sounded youthful on the phone when I called her. 'Come at twelve-thirty', she said, 'I should be through with my teaching by then. I have another batch of students coming later, so don't stay too long. I have sprained my right hand and feel a bit under the weather.' I asked her how to get to her house. 'You know Rustam's workshop? We're right behind it, in the same compound. But don't take the first gate, which leads to Lokbharati Press. Take the second one, beside Gaytime. There's a P C 0 there and a bicycle repair shop. You'll see two neem trees when you reach the end of the compound. Our house is behind the big bungalow, opposite the trees. You can't miss it.'
Partia I Recall
Descendants
T h e directions she gave took me by surprise. Not only did I know the place, I had been going past it all my life. It had always looked to be uninhabited. T h e gates had disappeared long ago
'He was J.M. Patell. He spelt Patell with rwo l's, Pat-ell. Actually, it's the same as Patel, but he thought Pate1 was too common-
and only the gateposts remained, their plaster gone, revealing the
breed. Unlike other photographers, my father did not use any
bricks. T h e compound, though little more than a dusty field, was big enough to hold a football match in. T h e bungalow stood at
form of artificial lighting in his studio. T h e glass panes in the roof let in natural light and he took his pictures in it. This limited
one end. It was a low, white building in surprisingly good repair, with a long verandah in front and castellation along the top. There
the hours he could work. It was rwo hours in the morning and just one in the afternoon. If the results did not satisfy him, he
was a cross o n top of the portico, like a finial. Below the cross it
asked the sitter to come back. In the end, the advances in tech-
said Pentecostal Church. T h e beginnings of a footpath with wild shrubs o n one side,
nology drove him out of business. Photography had become cheaper, though the prints were hot of the same quality as before.
where once there would have been a gravel drive lined with flower-
H e closed down the business in the mid 1950s, preferring to do
beds, appeared a little beyond the gatepost. I bicycled down the
that than to change his way of working'
14
path, went past the bungalow, and immediately came to the neem
15
sounding. He was a daylight photographer, one of the last of the
'What happened to his cameras and other equipment?'
with a tiled roof. T h e terracotta tiles looked freshly painted and
'You know how it is. People would come and say, "Mr Patell, we are setting up a studio. Your equipment is of no use to you
gave the place a cheerful appearance. I arrived just when a class
now, why don't you give it to us." And he would hand it over
had ended and saw the students coming out, the boys wearing blue blazers and grey trousers and the girls in green cardigans and grey skirts.
to them.'
trees. Opposite them, and hidden from the road, was a cottage
'Do you have any of his photographs?' 'Not really. But I'll look. Right now, I don't have the time. You
Mrs Dhondy, a short, slender woman with the faintest of grey
see, my father was quite famous in Allahabad. H e was more than
strands in her hair, greeted me in the verandah and took me inside.
a photographer; he was a photographer-artist. People would bring
Her sitting-room had a bare floor and though the furniture in it
him the picture of someone recently deceased, taken just before
belonged to an earlier period, the photographs on the walls were
the cremation or burial, or sometimes in the morgue, and ask
contemporary. They showed smiling West Indian cricketers posing
him to show the person as he or she looked when still alive. My
with a young man who too was smiling and looked like a busi-
father would take a photograph of the picture and then set about
ness executive.
transforming it, painting the eyes in, adding a bit of black to the
Mrs Dhondy saw me looking at the photographs and said,
hair, some pink to the lips. T h e customers yould be delighted.'
'That's my son. He's passionate about cricket. Those pictures were
I asked Mrs Dhondy how long her family had been settled in
taken in Sharjah.' I began by asking her about her father.
Allahabad. 'We've been here since the early 1900s. In the old days everyone
16
Partial Recall
knew the bungalow, 18 Canning Road, as Moti Sahib's hatta. Moti Sahib was C.D. Motishaw, my mother's father. In one part of the bungalow he had a motor showroom, the biggest motor showroom in the United Provinces. As a child, I remember sneaking into it to look at the gleaming new cars and motorcycles kept there. I d o not recall any of the makes except one, a Packard. It was a big car, more like a picnic bus. 'My grandfather died in 1937and 18 Canning Road was passed on to my grandmother, from whom I inherited it. Even in her time, we had a big rose garden. It was roses roses roses all the way to the front gate. In the middle of the garden was a circular platform, about twelve inches in height, where Mrs Benson's AngloIndian band played during my wedding reception. The band was nothing like the bands you see nowadays. It always included a pianist.' Mrs Dhondy briefly interrupted her train of thought to ask if I'd like some coffee. 'Allahabad's Parsi community', she resumed, 'which is now down to twenty members, was never very large. In my grandfather's time, it numbered around one hundred and fifty. It was a matter of great pride with us that despite our small number the top man in every field, not just business, was often a Parsi. Your English Department in the university had Dr P.E. Dustoor, the Economics Department had Dr J.K. Mehta, and among medical doctors there was Dr Hirji, the dentist. Rhoda Gandhi was his daughter. For many years after they left Allahabad, I kept up a correspondence with Dr and Mrs Dustoor. They would write to me from Kodaikanal and afterwards from Poona. I had preserved their letters, but at some point they got misplaced. I always say, if, God forbid, a thief were to break into our house, all he is going to find are photographs and papers, and more papers and more photographs.'
Descendants
17
I asked again about the Patell photographs and she said that she was not certain where they were, or even if she had any. She then changed the subject. She said, 'I do a bit of writing myself. I write poems mostly but also a little prose. I've written something on the Parsis that I'd like you to see. Like everything else, it is somewhere in this house, if I can only find it. 'Did you know, there's a lamppost outside All Saints Cathedral which says it was donated by C.D. Motishaw? It was one of four special lampposts erected as part of the beautification of Civil Lines. Were the English ever to 'come back and see what we've done to this place, they'll look for the nearest well to jump into. 'The other day, there was a Toyota parked on the road, blocking the entrance. I was in a rickshaw and kept sitting in it, glaring at the man whose car it was. He looked the neta type. But do you think he got the message? "My rickshaw does not have wings", I said to him, "so unless you move your car I cannot get out of the compound." To my rickshaw-walla I whispered, "Their ill-gotten money can buy these people cars, but no amount of money will buy them good breeding. Their fathers did not possess even a bicycle."' Mrs Dhondy had switched to the local dialect, Eastern Avadhi, which she spoke fluently when she told me what she had said to the car owner and the rickshaw-walla. She said, 'My husband keeps warning me that I'll get into trouble for the kinds of things I say. With Independence, we got freedom, but I don't think we got justice.' The second 'we' referred to the Parsis. Mrs Dhondy said it with a note of bitterness, but it was so fleeting that I almost did not notice it. Outside, through the parted curtains, I saw students in the verandah, arriving for the next class. As I got up to leave, I asked her about the Pentecostal Church.
Partial Recall
Descendants
She said, 'They're our tenants. They're very quiet and are no trouble at all. They've been here a long time.'
were sufficiently large in number, and, perhaps more importantly, the print technology and rail and postal infrastructure were available, for someone to come up with the idea of launching a Bengali magazine from the city. This was Ramananda Chatterjee. Ramananda, who belonged to a poor Brahmin family from Bankura in Bengal, was educated at Calcutta University. At a comparatively young age he was appointed Principal of Kayastha Pathshala in Allahabad, where he lived from 1895 to 1908. Perhaps the greatest magazine editor India has known, he started Prabasi [Expatriate] in 1901, and a second magazine, The Modern Review, in 1907. T h e contributors to the inaugural issue of The Modern Review included Sister Nivedita ('The Function ofArt in Shaping Nationality'), E.B. Have11 ('The Indian Handloom Industry'), and Jadunath Sarkar ('Shivaji Letters'). It also carried reproductions of three Ravi Varma paintings, along with an editorial note on the artist, who had recently died. Ramananda said in the note, 'A foreign literature and foreign tongue, as English is, cannot serve as the medium through which we may know one another and interchange our deepest thoughts and feelings. T h e books, periodicals and newspapers which we write in English have their uses, but they do not either reveal or reach the heart of the nation.' The romantic idea that the heart of a nation can find expression only in the vernacular is still with us. Though today the idea seems a little out of date, a hundred years ago it would have sounded different: ardently nationalist, forwardlooking, modern. Differences with the college management over educational reforms made Ramananda resign from his Kayastha Pathshala job, and the following year, in 1908, he ran into trouble with the British over some of the views expressed in The Modern Review. For instance, to the stated British opinion that Indian nationalism
18
O n e of the earliest accounts to mention the Bengali presence in Allahabad was Bishop Heber's Narrative ofajourney Through the Upper Provinces oflndia (1828). In it, Heber remarked that the 'Bengalees' who had come and settled in 'these provinces' when they were placed under British governors, were 'regarded by the Hindoostanees as no less foreigners than the English, and even more odious than Franks, from ancient prejudice, and from their national reputation of craft, covetousness, and cowardice.' A later visitor, who travelled through some of the same places as Heber, was Bholanuath Chunder. He came to Allahabad in 1860, when the Mutiny was still fresh in everyone's minds. The size of the Bengali community had grown in the intervening decades, and it was this rather than the foreignness that caught Chunder's attention. 'Great numbers of Bengalees abound in Allahabad, some six thousand. Their errands are various-health, wealth, and pilgrimage', he wrote in Travels ofa Hindoo (1869), a book which many at the time thought was written not by an Indian but by a European under a pseudonym. Moreover, what to the 'Hindoostanees', in Heber's account, indicated the Bengali's 'covetousness', was to Chunder a sign of prosperity and generosity, some of which he partook of. He described his local host in the following terms, 'In the true spirit of a fast money-making and money-expending Kayust, Baboo N-is accustomed to keep an open house and table for all his friends passing on, and from, a tour of the Upper Provinces.' By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Allahabad Bengalis
19
20
Partial Recall
was losing momentum, Ramananda wrote: 'Never in the history of the world has there been committed any aggression that did not end in raising up a greater force of resistance to overwhelm it.' Served with an order to close down the Review or leave Allahabad, he chose the latter option and returned to Calcutta, moving the editorial offices of the two magazines with him. By then he was also heavily in debt. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who joined the editorial staff in 1928, wrote about the magazines in his autobiography Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1987): 'The Prabasi stood for both nationalism and liberalism, and it was the magazine to which Tagore gave most of his new work. It also had the pick of the best work in fiction and poetry in the Bengali language. It was a great honour for any new writer to appear in it. . . . The Modern Review in English had an all-India circulation and was more weighty politically. It was read with interest and respect even by the British Governors.' In Allahabad, both Prabasi and The Modem Review were printed at The Indian Press, founded by Chintamoni Ghosh. The Ghoshs came from Bally in Howrah District in Bengal. Chintamoni's father, Madhav Chandra, held an administrative job under the British, and in 1864 was posted to Benares. After two years in Benares, Madhav Chandra came to Allahabad on official work, but he was suddenly taken ill on the trip and died shortly afterwards. His mother, wife, and two children, Chintamoni, aged 12, and an older daughter, all of whom had rushed from Benares when they heard of the illness, were with him when he died. According to family legend, Chintamoni returned to Bally, then a week's journey from Allahabad, but did not stay there for long. His uncles, he discovered, were eyeing his share of the ancestral property and had hatched a plot to murder him. With few options open, Chintamoni decided that he must leave Bally at once and
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21
go back to Allahabad. It is difficult to imagine a boy his age taking this decision on his own, but Chintamoni's life, at least in the telling, with only family sources to go by, is like a fable. In the beginning, things weren't easy for him. His mother and gandmother had between them a few gold ornaments, most of which they sold off to settle the debts accumulated during Madhav Chandra's illness and to make the journey to Bally. The rest they sold on their return to Allahabad, to meet the expenses in their first months in the city. Chintamoni had attended school in Benares, where his teachers had found him to be a quick learner with an aptitude for maths. He now wanted to resume his education, but being the only male in the family was forced to look for work instead. His first job was with the Pioneer newspaper, where, at a salary of Rs 10 per month, he became a dispatch clerk. The large leatherbound registers in which he was supposed to make entries were, for a young boy, difficult to reach, and Chintamoni had them brought down and did the posting sitting on the floor. When his immediate Indian bosses saw that the lad was hard-working, they piled more work on him. But whenever he got the chance he spent time in the printing room. There he picked up the rudiments of the trade-typesetting, make-up, and imposition, all the while dreaming, as his biographer N.G. Bagchi writes, 'the far-fetched dream of owning a press someday!' His father's death had interrupted his formal education, and he now did everything he could to make up for its lack. Luckily, his job at the Pioneer entitled him to a free copy of the paper. H e read i t every day, line by line, as though it were a textbook, and in this manner improved his English. He was with the newspaper for about seven years, and, when he left, it had to hire five men to do the work he had performed single-handed.
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Descendants
Chintamoni's next job was with the Railway Mail Service, but he was there for a few days only. When a vacancy of Head Clerk arose at the Meteorological Department, he applied, and so impressed the English superintendent that though there were many applicants with better qualifications he was selected above them. It was during his years in the Meteorological Department that he
Press was a series of physical geography readers in 1887. T h e author was E.G. Hill, who later became professor of chemistry at
got married and also discovered that he had an eye for business.
T h e story goes that Hill once remarked upon how successful
He bought railway sleepers cheaply at an auction and after getting
his books had been and Chintamoni, though not contractually
the wood chopped into small pieces sold it as fuel at a modest profit. O n e day he hit on the idea of converting some of the
bound to do so, immediately offered to share part of the profits with him; an offer that Hill, in keeping with such stories, graci-
wood into cheap furniture and hired a carpenter to execute the
ously refused.
22
plan. T h e profit from this new venture was considerable, and he was soon looking for a partner to expand the business.
23
the Muir Central College of Allahabad University. Hill had sold the copyright to Chintamoni against a one-time fee, so when the Department of Public Instruction approved them for school adoption it was the publisher and not Hill who reaped the benefits.
v
Two years later, in 1889, Chintamoni brought out a series of
T h e dream of being a printer, though, had not left him, and
graded readers for Hindi, Shikshavali, that turned out to be even more successful. Compared with the books then available, which
when a Crown hand press with accessories, belonging to a regi-
were printed in the Government Press on indifferent paper and
mental unit, came up for sale, he saw his chance. Along with a friend who put up half the money, he bought the machine and
had been prepared thirty years earlier, these readers broke new ground in terms of language and content as well as layout and
had it installed in a room in his house. H e could not afford to hire an assistant and did everything himself, including the printing,
typography. For generations of Indian children they were their first experience of Hindi in the classroom, just as, later, the Radiant Readers were their first taste of English. Soon after Shikshavali
after coming back from his office in the Meteorological Department. There was, in an expanding city, no shortage of work and
was published Chintamoni decided to resign his job in the
the press did extremely well, but before a year had passed his friend heard the call of God and, losing all interest in the business,
Meteorological Department and devote all his time to running The Indian Press.
decided to quit. Nevertheless, he was a decent sort and did not
Chintamoni died in August 1928. T h e following month, the
ask for anything more than what he had initially put in. Chinta-
influential Hindi monthly Saraswati, which he had started in
moni, who knew a good deal when he saw one, immediately raised
1900, brought out a commemorative issue on him. It consisted
4 June 1884 had the press
of reminiscences and eulogies, some of the latter, by Maithili
registered as T h e Indian Press. He was 30 years old at the time.
Sharan Gupta and Mahabir Prasad Dwivedi, in poetic form.
During the early years of printing in India, as in Europe also,
Dwivedi had been the editor of Saraswati from 1903 to 1920.
the roles of printer and publisher were combined in the same
During this period he held perhaps the most important job in
person. The first title published by Chintamoni fromThe Indian
the Hindi literary world. For a writer to be published in Saraswati
the funds to pay off his friend and on
25
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was a sign of national recognition. Dwivedi first came to Chinta-
other a sign saying 'Post Office'. The hundreds of book parcels
rnoni's notice when he saw a scathing review by him of a Hindi
that were dispatched every day from the Press, many by VPP
24
primer published by The Indian Press. The review so impressed
to individual customers in remote villages, had led the postal
Chintamoni that instead of being offended he offered Dwivedi
department to set up a post office on the premises itself. In these
the editorship of his magazine. The reminiscences in the com-
parcels, in addition to school textbooks, went copies of Saraswati;
memorative issue were by Shyamsundar Das, who was the first
a Nawab Rai novel; the first illustrated title in Hindi for young
editor ofSaraswati, Ganganatha Jha, and C.Y. Chintamani, among
adults; Mahabir Prasad Dwivedi's translations of Bhartrihari,
several others. O n the last page were messages from abroad, in-
Kalidasa, Jayadeva, Jagannath, and Herbert Spencer; Shyamsundar
cluding one from 2 1 Holland Street, Kensington, London, by
Das's annotated edition of Ramcaritmanas; the Valmiki Rama-
E.G. Hill's widow.
yana; scholarly editions ofvidyapati's poems and Tulsidas's Knaya
The commemorative issue also carried a number of half-tone
Patrika; the first anthology of poems in Khari Boli; Edwin
photographs. They showed Chintamoni's mother, his wife, and
Greaves's Hindi grammar; Hindi translations of Fa Hsien, Hiuen
him with his gandchildren; others showed the Ghosh residences
Tsiang, Alberuni, Shakespeare, Romesh Chunder Dutt, and Sharat
in Benares, Puri, and Allahabad. These were imposing buildings,
Chandra; an early Hindi novel written specifically for women;
colonial piles on a grand scale, but by themselves, without any
and, in 1926, Sumitranandan Pant's Pallav, a collection of poems
sign of human activity in the foreground, the houses looked aban-
which is generally said to contain his finest work.
doned. The majority of the photographs, however, were about
Just as the Chosh family bought houses in other cities, T h e
The Indian Press. These were pictures of typecasting machines
Indian Press also expanded outside Allahabad. O n e of the photo-
and litho presses, cameras and photo-etching equipment, Linotype
graphs was of the company's Calcutta branch, its thirty-odd
composing machines and offset printing machines. O n e picture,
employees standing in a semicircle in front of it; another showed
titled 'English Composing Room', showed rows of young men,
the Indian Publishing House building. Set up in 1908, the Indian
their heads bent, seated behind wooden cases; others showed the
Publishing House was a subsidiary o f T h e Indian Press and had
stitching and binding rooms, the men in them working sitting
its offices at 22 Cornwallis Street, Calcutta. It published books in
on the floor. T h e pictures encapsulated the history of printing in
Bangla and had brought out a history of the Bengali language, a
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
life ofVidyasagar, and a two-volume Bangla dictionary. Rabindra-
Perhaps the picture that best gives an idea of the scale o f T h e
nath Tagore was one of their authors.
Indian Press is of a bald man with a white handlebar moustache,
Tagore had first heard of Chintamoni Ghosh and T h e Indian
wearing a dhoti and coat, and sitting behind an office table that
Press through Prabasi, to which he was a regular contributor. It
is placed in a doorway, blocking it. There are, on the table,
was unusual in the first decade of the last century for high-quality
some papers, a metal office tray, rubber scamps, and an inkpad. A
printing in Bangla to be done outside Calcutta, and Tagore had
'No Admission' sign is nailed on one of the door panels, on the
been struck by what a printer in Allahabad had achieved.
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His own association withThe Indian Press came about through the efforts of Charuchandra Bandhopadhya~,a Bengali writer who worked for Prabasi and had earlier worked for the Tagore family magazine Bharati, and of Nepal Chandra Roy, who was the retired headmaster of the Anglo-Bengali School in Allahabad. According to the Deed of Agreement registered in 1906 between Chintamoni and Tagore, The Indian Press became Tagore's main publishers. Apart from bringing out individual titles-Gitanjali (1910), Gitali (1914), Balaka (19 16)-they also published his collected poems in a ten-volume uniform edition, Kavya Grantha (1915-16). Tagore's association with the Press ended in 1922 when he set up his university, Viswabharati. He had donated the money from his Nobel Prize and all his earnings from royalties to it, but the institution needed more funds. H e wrote to Chintamoni, asking him if he would surrender his rights to the Tagore titles so that Viswabharati could publish them and the profits accrue to the university. Chintamoni agreed, and though the loss of a bestselling author affected his balance-sheet he did not take a rupee in compensation. To his son Hari Keshab-to whom he would leave the responsibility of running The Indian Press after his deathhe reportedly said, 'I have not merely given back the rights. I have made a permanent contribution to the nation.'
garland, whose withered flowers were still a bright orange, gave to the statue a touch of colour. O n one side of it, along a wall, were stacked reams of printing paper in white plastic wrapping. O n the other was a row of wooden almirahs with glass fronts, the glass mostly missing or broken. The almirahs were padlocked and crammed with books, their titles illegible. O n the wall was an oil portrait of a slender-looking elderly man in mortarboard
26
A glass-encased life-size statue of Chintamoni Ghosh, his dates engraved on the pedestal, stands in the front hall, near the entrance of The Indian Press. His right hand grips a walking stick; his left fist is clenched, to suggest determination, H e has a full beard. When I visited The Indian Press for the first time, a marigold
27
and gown. He was Shyamsundar Das. I walked along the almirahs and came to a break in the row. Since there was no one around whom I could ask for directions, I took a chance and turned inte it, as into a doorway. I found myself in the midst of more almirahs, but arranged to form an office cabin. There was no electricity because of a power-cut and it was dark inside the cabin, but once my eyes had adjusted to the darkness I could make out an office table and someone sitting behind it. This was Supratik Ghosh, Chintamoni's great-grandson. Supratik was in his mid forties but his square glasses, sweptback thinning hair, and slightly sagging jaw made him look older. He seemed naturally reticent as well as suspicious of people he had not met before. To get him to talk about himself to a complete stranger was, initially, not easy. Supratik said, 'After finishing school, I thought I would do mechanical engineering like my father, who had studied at Jadavpur. I spent a whole year cramming for the entrance exam, but could not make the grade. In the end I joined the university. I did a BSc and then took a master's degree in economics. After that, for many years, I worked for my father's company, Precision Tools. Essentially, we did work for two industrial units based in Naini, Hindustan Cables and Triveni Engineering. But in the 1990s they were beset with labour problems and eventually closed down. We found it difficult to survive without them, and though
28
Partial Recall
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29
we continued for a couple of more years we had to close down too. I have been with The Indian Press since. You could say I am a late entrant. 'I tried my hand at publishing at first and brought out a set of six study guides, one on general knowledge, one on Indian history, one on political science, and so on, aimed at candidates taking the Provincial Civil Service exam. T h e p i d e s sold well, especially in the shops on University Road. T h e snag came when I went to the booksellers to collect the money they owed me. They would never say that they wouldn't pay, but all the same would fob me off with some excuse or other. Every few days I would make the rounds on my scooter and come away empty-handed. In the end, unable to recover a single paisa, I lost interest in the project. It's a dirty market.' I asked him what he did now. Supratik said, 'Mter the publishing thing failed, I bought a couple of secondhand Japanese offset machines and became a job-printer. It may come as a surprise to you, but ninety per cent of the work I get has to do with printing study guides similar to the ones I had brought out. There is these days a guide available for every competitive exam and university course. T h e demand for them is far greater than for textbooks. Occasionally I get to do confidential work, like printing examination papers. 'I got out of publishing, but The Indian Press still has a small list. It consists of reprints of those of our old titles for which there is still a demand, like Meghnad Saha's Treatise on Heat. My uncle Satya Prasad, or Suttu Babu as everyone calls him, handles that side of the business. Some years ago we did another reprint of Ishwari Prasad's History of Medieval India. I was never a student ofEnglish, but I doubt any Indian historian these days can match Ishwari Prasad's writing style.'
O u r next meeting was again during a power-cut, so I was surprised to find there was light in the cabin. It came from a solitary striplight suspended from the ceiling. In the background, I could hear the muffled sound of a genset. T h e ceiling, I noticed, was black with cobwebs and had wires stretched across it. Some of the wires led to a fan or to a light fixture, but often these were missing, leaving the wires hanging. Separating Supratik's cabin from the one adjoining it was a wooden partition with a door in the middle and glass panels on the sides. This time the door was open. I could see, in the other cabin, a refrigerator that seemed to have been designed when Art Deco was all the rage; an office table heaped with papers that had turned yellow; a revolving office chair with torn upholstery; two empty drums of printing ink; and a metal typewriter cover, painted black, with 'Remington' written on it. There was dust everywhere. It was as though, fifty or more years ago, the cabin's occupant had gone home one evening and not returned, and no one had entered the place since. Supratik pulled out a book from the bottom drawer of his table and gave it to me to look at. It was the second edition of Prasad's Medieval India, published in 1928. H e said, 'I found it in one of the warehouses. It was the only copy left. I have rescued a few interesting things in this way. O r at least what to me looked interesting.' T h e book was heavier and thicker than I expected. Bound in boards, it showed the 'Pillar of Victory at Chittore' on the cover. Inside, the pages had generous margins, the printing was clean, the paper had not yet turned brittle, and the reproduction quality of the twenty-one black-and-white photographs, on art paper, was surprisingly good. I asked Supratik if I could buy a copy of the reprint and k as far as the he asked a peon to get it. T h e ~ a ~ e r b a creprint, #
30
Partial Recall
production quality went, was no better than the dozens of cheap study guides displayed in the bookstalls on University Road. There was no half-title page, nor was there a 'history' of the book, giving the date of first publication, and dates of subsequent revised editions and reprints. Like the study guides, it was printed on cheap
Descendants
31
in earnest, I used to say like Oliver Goldsmith, "My publishers are my patrons."' Suttu Babu had lived through the decline of The Indian Press,
when Suttu Babu walked in. He was a delicate-looking man in
but he did not give me a chance to put any questions to him. He did not sit down. His cabin was behind the one adjoining Supratik's, and taking his leave he scurried towards it. After he had left, Supratik reached for the bottom drawer of his desk again and I thought he was going to show me another
his early seventies and had a small clutch bag tucked under his
book. Instead, he brought out a manila envelope and very gently
arm. Supratik introduced us. Suttu Babu said, 'Ishwari Prasad was a regular visitor to The
pulled out a folded sheet that came apart even as he was pulling
newsprint-like paper. T h e photographs were a washout. I was still comparing the early edition with the recent reprint
Indian Press. In his last years, when he could not move around
it. Bits and pieces of the sheet l i y scattered on the table, like the pieces of a jigsaw. I could make out, in the pieces, a printed dia-
a history of the French Revolution and a volume on the sources
gram with words and dates written in Bangla. Some words were written in pencil. Supratik shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
of Indian history. After his death, I asked his daughter about the
H e said, 'I thought I'd show you our family tree, but I didn't real-
manuscripts, but she pretended as though she had never heard
ize that the paper had become so brittle. There is a photocopy of it at home and if you're interested I could bring it next time we
much, I would go over to his house. He was at the time finishing
of them. We were supposed to publish the bboks. I still have the contracts.'
meet.' He then proceeded to return the jigsaw to its envelope.
I was hoping that Suttu Babu would sit down so I could ask him more about The Indian Press. His father, Hari Keshab, had been as much of an entrepreneur as Chintamoni. H e continued with the printing and publishing businesses o f T h e Indian Press,
Ritu Rudra rose from her chair and, holding on to the furniture
maintaining the same high standards, but also diversified into
for support, taking one step at a time, asked me to follow her. At
other areas. He started a sugar mill in Bihar and, in Allahabad,
78, she was naturally cautious in her movements, but her mental
built market complexes and residential units which he rented out.
agility was of someone sixty years younger. She had recently had
When he died in 1953, Saraswati brought out a commemorat-
a cataract removed and been operated on for breast cancer some years earlier, but her suffering then, she said, was nothing compared to what she went through after the cataract, when she was unable to read or do the crossword for several weeks. She called it the worst period of her life. We went through the kitchen and came to a large bright room
ive issue, just as it had done for Chintamoni, consisting of tributes, photographs, and messages. The opening tribute, in verse, was by Sumitranandan Pant. There was also a tribute by Ishwari Prasad, who wrote, 'I had enjoyed his friendship uninterruptedly for more than three decades, and sometimes half in jest and half
32
Partial Recall
Descendants
at the back of the house. It seemed originally to have been a veran-
Principal Rudra was Ritu's grandfather.
33
dah and was scattered with books. I noticed a volume on Indian
Ritu said, 'My geat-grandfather, Pyari Mohan Rudra, came
birds, books on philosophy and religion, paperback novels.
from a landowning family in Bengal and was baptised by the
Despite the layer ofgammexane powder that lay on them, termites
Scottish missionary Alexander Duff. T h e conversion caused a big
had damaged the books and in some cases the holes were the size
outcry in his native village and he could not return to it for a
of a rupee coin. She looked around the room and apologized
while, for fear of harm. He was, though, an educated man, having
for the mess.
gone to college in Calcutta. Drawn by the teachings of the scrip-
She said, 'As you can see, we had to demolish half the bungalow.
tures, he had converted by choice. Later, he joined the clergy and
The new owners are putting up a school there. The demolition
was in charge of the Nadiya Mission, with many congregations
was too much to bear and I shifted to a friend's place when it
under his care. I am told he wrote hymns in Bengali that are sung
took place. I've just moved back and am still getting organized.'
even today. We're not "rice chri;tiansn.'
Finally, in a pile on the floor, she found what she was looking for.
We returned to the living-room, which used to be her father's
It was a book called Indian Christians: Biographical a n d Criti-
study, and sat down again. A maid emerged from the kitchen
cal Sketches, published by 'G.A. Natesan & Co., Madras', 'Price
with two glasses of water on a tray. She said 'Good morning' to
Rs Three', and contained biographies of Krishna Mohan Banerjea, La1 Behari Day, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, W.T. Satthianadan,
me, using the English phrase, which took me by surprise. She addressed Ritu as 'Ritu Baba' and they briefly discussed what the
Pandita Ramabai, and Sushi1 Kumar Rudra. Rudra was the first
maid was going to cook for lunch.
Indian principal of St Stephen's College, Delhi, and a close
The living-room had a red stone floor. The stones were hexa-
associate of C.F. Andrews and Mahatma Gandhi. When he died
gonal and formed a honeycomb pattern. The false ceiling had
in 1925, Gandhi wrote in Young India,
rotted away and been dismantled, exposing the rafters and the
Ever since my return home in 19 15, I had been his guest whenever I had occasion to go to Delhi. . . . He was the first Indian Principal chosen in his College. I, therefore, felt that his intimate association with me and giving me shelter under his roof might compro~nise him and expose his College to unnecessary risk. I, therefore, offered to seek shelter elsewhere. His reply was characteristic: 'My religion is deeper than people may imagine. Some of my opinions are vital parts of my being. They are formed after deep and prolonged prayers. They are known to my English friends. I cannot possibly be misunderstood by keeping you under my roof as an honoured friend and guest. And ifever I have to make a choice between losing what influence I may have among Englishmen and losing you, I know what I would choose. You cannot leave me.'
undersides of the red roof tiles. T h e walls were a dark shade of blue, the coat of whitewash showing under the paintwork, and there were two skylights. Pushed against one of the walls was a large oval dining-table, covered with a plastic sheet to protect the linen tablecloth. O n a couple of smaller tables on the opposite wall were a Philips music system and stacks of cassettes and CDs. T h e music was Western classical, but not entirely. A corner table, l e d ~books and near the entrance, was ~ i l e dh i g g l e d y - ~ i ~ ~ with papers. The other furniture in the room consisted ofan assortment of comfortable old chairs painted black, two old china-closets with straight legs, and a teapoy. Above the music system were photographs of Ritu's parents. Her father's face was intense,
Descendants 36
37
Partial Recall They had all come inside the living-room, made their deliveries, Ritu said, 'My father and Amaranatha Jha were friends but
and left, and seemed well versed in the ways of the house. There
they were never very close. Jha was an elitist. He set great store by a student's family background, particularly when he was admitting one to Muir Hostel, of which he was Warden. My father, who
were hardly any words exchanged between them and Ritu. The
was an egalitarian, treated everyone the same. Jha's wife, though,
tight-fitting tunic, and a dhoti. H e wore a gold earring in one ear
was the opposite of her husband. She was a down-to-earth village
and brought the week's washing on the back of a donkey.
dhobi's family had worked for the Rudras for three generations. T h e gandfather, Sarju, Ritu recalled, always wore a pugree, a
woman from Bihar and did not know a word of English. I have a memory of her sitting in the courtyard of her house, chopping
adding that she did not know where it was and that it would be
vegetables. She was very traditional. I never saw her wearing a
difficult to find. From time to time, I would remind her of it,
blouse or appearing in public. Even when there was a dinner at the Jhas, she did not come out to meet the guests. It was as
and though she promised she wopld ask her sister Dipika to look,
though Jha was embarrassed by her. O n these occasions my mother went across to help with the arrangements and played
Dipika was the youngest of Sudhir Kumar's five daughters. Married to a Keralite, she had spent most of her time in South
the role of hostess.'
India, but returned to live in her father's house, the house in
As we talked, a man dressed in a white shirt and white pyjamas
O n a subsequent visit, Ritu had mentioned her father's diary,
I was doubtful that it would ever turn up.
came and stood in the front door. He said 'Salaam huzoor' and,
which she was born, after her husband's death. Ritu herself had never married. She had always lived in Allahabad and, before
shuffling off his chappals, sat down in the chair nearest the
retirement, taught philosophy at Ewing Christian College. She
entrance. He sat on the edge of the chair, as though uncomfortable in it. The glasses he wore had thick lenses, behind which his eyes
had a doctorate from Claremont and had taught at Columbia University for a year. A third sister who stayed in the house
appeared to be of a grey colour. He had several teeth missing and
was Pramila. She had retired from her teaching job at Lawrence
looked very frail. After a while, Ritu asked him to go inside into
School, Sanawar. Then one day Dipika called to say that she had found the
the kitchen. Ritu said, 'He's our tailor Kadir Bux. He had a shop in Civil
diary.
Lines, but the building was pulled down last year and a multiplex
Since Jha and Rudra had been contemporaries, and both had
is coming up in its place. He now makes a round of his old custom-
taught at the same university and moved in the same circles, it
ers and takes home whatever work he gets. My sisters and I try to give him something to mend or stitch whenever he comes.
had crossed my mind, when I first heard about it, that Rudra's
He also gets a cup of tea and a bit to eat. He usually turns up around lunchtime.' Kadir Bux was not the only one who had visited Ritu that morning. Before him the milkman, the meatman, the fishmonger, the fruit and vegetable vendors, and the dhobi had been there.
diary might not be very different from Jha's. I could not have been more wrong. Jha's diary had read like an engagement book. It enumerated, nearly always without comment, the names of the people he'd met ('February 6 1930: Called on Mrs Naidu at Anand Bhavan.
Partial Recall
Descendants
Met Padmaja also'), the functions he'd attended ('February 5 192 1:
With an openness that is entirely beguiling and with a poet's eye
Boy Scouts' Rally in honour of Lord Baden-Powell'), and the
for detail, he writes about the early years of his marriage and the
meetings he'd chaired ('September 29 1923: I presided over
rented Muir Road bungalow in which those years were spent;
Professor Seshadri's lecture on "Love Poetry in English"'), with
about the birth of his children and of two deaths; about making
sometimes a glance at the day's ~oliticalevents ('March 11 1922:
a sandpit and falling off a horse; about the purchase of a Fiat
M r Gandhi has been arrested'). Rarely does Jha refer to anything
motorcar and, in 1932, of 20 Albert Road, the very house in
personal, and when he does he adopts the same dry, slightly gruff
which, sitting in a black armchair, I was reading the diary; and
tone. O n the day of his marriage, for instance, he wrote, 'June 22
about the recruitment and dismissal of servants:
38
39
1922: I was married at Bettiah at midday to the youngest daughter of the late Pandit Harimohan Jha.' One of the few exceptions to this is when he was finally leaving the university, after being associated with it for thirty years, to become chairman of the Public Service Commission, Uttar Pradesh. O n 31 March 1947 he confided to his diary, 'I wrote to Kewal Krishna and Ramji-and wept as I wrote, making over charge of the Muir Hostel to them.
We have a cook, Abdul, who is a funny kind of bloke. I took him on when Mohini [Rudra's wife] was away in Lahore, expecting Bobby. He seemed to be a smart bearer j n d produced good chits. Mohini once got very angry with him and dismissed him. I am sorry I interfered and had him reinstated. Now he has hung around. H e is jolly dirty, an absolute pig. I shudder to think he is our cook! I wish we could replace him. This summer, 1938, he nearly died of enteric.
No one can realize what these boys have meant to a lonely man.' of the
Apart from the diary, 'The Rudra Book', as the family has
Royal Society of Literature, President of the All-India Lawn Tennis
After all the self-importance, all the honours-Fellow
always called the custom-made ruled notebook, contained the
Association, and so on-this
comes as a shock. The Jhas did not
children's medical records and details of investments and expenses.
have any children of their own, which may explain the sense of
These were in Mohini Rudra's hand. There were also, loosely
loneliness he felt. He died in 1955. His enormous up-to-date
kept between its pages, a few old receipts and letters, the latter
library, consisting of several thousand titles, some of which, like
still in the envelopes in which they were received. They were letters
Ezra Pound's Quia Pauper Amavi (Egoist Press, 19 19), would
of condolence received by the family when Sudhir Kumar died.
today fetch good prices on the rare books market, was bequeathed
Ritu had often talked about the family vacations in Ramgarh,
to the university, where, in the fitness ofthings, maggots reduced
Binsar, and Ranikhet in the Kumaon hills. She remembered them
most of it to powder. His papers, which included a complete
mainly for the long walks, like the one from Binsar to Almora, a
translation of the seventeenth-century Hindi poet Bihari, were
distance of fourteen miles. But on that occasion she had not
either lost or destroyed.
walked and her father had had to carry her on his shoulders for
Despite the reserve, Jha's diary was a window into the social
most of the distance. Though a coolie had accompanied them,
and cultural world of Allahabad of the 1 920s, 1930s, and 1940s;
she refused to go to him, unable to bear his smell. Her mother,
Rudra's, covering the same period, is centred on its domestic life.
on these walks, would point out the wild flowers along the way
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Descendants
and identi+ them for the children. When they returned to the
could jump, separated the compounds. The bungalow was for a
40
cottage hired for the season-it
was often set amidst an orchard-
41
a meal, made by a cook who had travelled with them from
while occupied by an English family who were in the carpet business, and then by a down-at-heel Anglo-Indian who was a tenant.
Allahabad, would be awaiting them. The other servant who had travelled with them was the sweeper, whose hereditary job was to
One morning, he turned up outside his neighbour Sudhir Kumar's gate, and after borrowing money from him disappeared without
clean out the commodes.
trace. It later came out that he owed money all round, including
But the Rudras when they went on vacation took more than servants with them. Two pages in the diary gave a list of 'Vacation Requisites', itemized under seven headings, 'Bedding', 'Tiffin basket', 'Toilet', 'Bathroom', 'Bedroom', Drawing-room', and
rent to his landlord.
'Dining-room'. The 'requisites', about a hundred-odd in number,
The next owner was a young Nepalese rana, a man called Balendu Shah. He liked to live well, and had the means to do so. T h e first thing he did when he moved into the house was to order some high-quality European-style furniture. In local
included mosquito nets, plates, cups and saucers, a butter dish, toothpicks, tablecloths, a tin-opener, brandy, Listerine, carbolic soap, coat hangers, Bromo paper, buckets, soap dishes, face towels,
not for his money but his cricketing abilities. He was a fine bat. It was from him that in the late 1940s Khelat Chandra Bhattacharya
phenol, curtains, vases, cushions, rugs, ashtrays, visiting cards,
purchased the bungalow, the furniture included. Khelat Chandra
cigarettes, a cruet-stand, mustard, forks, knives, spoons, table-
was Arun Kumar's uncle. He was a retired civil surgeon, but those
cloths, soup plates, milk jugs, eggcups, serviettes, dishcloths, and
who remembered him spoke of him in soldierly terms. They des-
finger bowls. Also forming part of the luggage, Pramila once told
cribed him as a man of 'military bearing', as someone who stood 'ramrod straight'.
me, was a gramophone, gramophone records, a carrom board, and a stack of storybooks from which Sudhir Kumar sometimes read aloud.
sporting circles, where he was a familiar figure, he was known
The Bhattacharyas were from Shantipur in West Bengal, and
The bungalow may have had a fixed address, like, say, 20 Albert
Arun Kumar's father may have been the first one in the family to leave the village in search of a new life. He came and settled in
Road, but when the residents moved it moved with them. The
Benares, and got a job in a college there. Arun Kumar, who grew
bungalow was a way of life, and while it lasted it was portable.
up in Benares, came to Allahabad in 1944, to do his BSc. He must have impressed Arnaranatha Jha, who admitted him to Muir Hostel, which in those days was the most anglicized of the university hostels and difficult to get into. (In the 1940s, 'Murian' had
Adjacent to the Rudra house, facing Thornhill Road, was the
the same ring that 'Stephanian' has today.) He stayed there two
bungalow in which Arun Kumar Bhattacharya lived. The two
years and completed his degree. What he did after that no one
bungalows were identical and built around the same time, in the
knows. As one of his closest friends said to me, 'There's a gap in
first decade of the last century. A low brick wall, which any child
the story.'
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42
Arun Kumar returned to the university in 1950, to d o his MA
43
chairs and a sideboard. He asked Rs 55,000 for them. Mrs Khelat
in English literature. This time he did not seek admission to Muir Hostel but stayed with Khelat Chandra at 24 Thornhill Road.
Chandra had meanwhile died.
He stayed in one room at the rear of the house and had his meals
corner bungalow on Thornhill Road he had first come to as a
with the family. Since he was not married, he continued to
student. He had been living there for forty-five years and had
live there, in that one room, even after he started teaching at
grown used to the place. He was 70 years old and it would have
the university.
seemed very unlikely to him that he was ever going to leave and
Ten years later, Arun Kumar was still living there, in the same
After Khelat Chandra's death, the responsibility of taking care
move into his flat. He got a good price for the flat and sold it off.
of his old wife, and indeed of the house and the Ambassador car,
As for the car, despite a few engine problems, it still enabled him
the same one in which I would see him driving around, fell largely
to get around. H e saw no call to change the car either.
on Arun Kumar. Though the Chandras had children of their
Meanwhile, land prices in Allafiabad had skyrocketed and the
own, a son and a daughter, they lived elsewhere, not in Allahabad.
building mafia was eyeing Khelat Chandra's property. It was almost
he
son was in Calcutta, where he worked for Martin Burn,
two acres of land, enough to build at least twenty independent
and he later settled in America. Arun Kumar, driving back from
houses on. Arun Kumar's cousin, Khelat Chandra's son, was keen
the university or from Civil Lines in his uncle's car, must have
to sell, and even turned up one year in Allahabad with the in-
sometimes felt that he was returning not to his uncle's house but
tention of finalizing a deal, but with Arun Kumar refusing to
to his own.
move out, the sale fell through. O n that occasion, to everyone's
'Batty did not have to buy a spoon in his life', was a remark I
surprise, Arun Kumar produced Mrs Khelat Chandra's will (some
heard often when I asked my older colleagues about him. Batty,
say it was a letter written by her). It stated that the bungalow was
as his friends called Arun Kumar, also had the reputation of
to go to her son, but Arun Kumar could live in it for his lifetime.
being a miser. He certainly had the money, earned during stints
The only condition was that he had to maintain the bungalow
of school-teaching abroad, to back the reputation. When they
and pay the house and water taxes, a negligible sum of a few
went to the Coffee House, 1was told, Batty was always the last in
hundred rupees annually.
the company to reach for his wallet. H e paid only if someone else had not paid for him and usually someone had.
T h e episode had left Arun Kumar badly shaken. H e confided to a friend that for the first time he had started feeling unsafe in
By the time he retired in 1985, Arun Kumar had bought his
the house. Since he had a heart condition and lived alone, he
own place, a modest two-bedroom Allahabad Development
worried that there was no one around to call out to should he
Authority flat on the fourth floor, but he continued to live in the
need medical help at night. He looked more apprehensive, his
bungalow and to rent out the flat. At about this time, in the mid-
friend said, than he had ever seen him.
1980s, he tried to sell off some of the Balendu Shah furniture: a C. Lazarus of Calcutta mahogany !gate-leg dining-table with eight
Ritu remembers the date, 12 May 1995, even today. She had just finished watching The World This Week on
TV,when
she
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heard a banging on the door. Outside she found her servants standing in a huddle. Their quarters were close by, in a lane that
'Unfortunately, the person who had contacted him misunderstood the message. He thought the brother had asked them to wait. In the forty-eight hours it took the brother to get here, the body had become so bloated and it stank so much that no cne was prepared to go inside. In the end, they had to ply one of the sweepers with a lot of booze before he agreed to get the body out.' Less than a month later, 24 Thornhill Road was demolished.
44
ran along one side of her property, but since they were not usually awake at that hour she was surprised to see them. It was the wedding season and the servants had been waiting for the barat to arrive. A few people were waiting on the road, and had seen three men jump over her compound wall. One of the men had washed himself at the hand pump outside the lane and gone off in the direction of the Anglo-Indian Colony. The other two had left on a scooter that was parked not far from her 'gate. They were in a hurry to get away. It all looked very suspicious and the servants had come out of concern, to check if everything was all right. Ritu said, 'I double-checked all my doors and locks, and finding everything was in order went to bed. I heard about it only the next morning and immediately went across. He was lying on the floor, wearing blue pyjamas and a half-sleeve shirt, his hands not straight by his side but raised to about the level of his shoulders. There was a piece of electrical flex round his neck, the ends of the flex touching the palms. I recognized a journalist from the Patrika in the crowd and asked him what he knew. He gestured towards the men from the police station and said he had been told that Arun Kumar suffered from depression and had committed suicide. He tended to believe them. I said this was nonsense. I had known Arun Kumar for years and he was not the suicidal type. He was a fighter. In any case, it was impossible for a person to strangulate himself in this fashion, lying on the floor. 'But what happened subsequently is even more horrifying. Arun Kumar's closest surviving relative was his brother in Poona. He said that since it would take him two days to reach Allahabad, they should go ahead with the cremation.
When my father, a dentist, came to Allahabad from Dehra Dun in 1949, we first stayed with his elder brother at 20 Hastings Road. We did not live in the main bungalow but in a cottage at the back. It had a pitched roof, tiny rooms, a coal-trough, a front verandah, and an oleander hedge. I call it a cottage because of its size and appearance, though at the time it was built it would have been the kitchen and pantry, which in the colonial bungalow were not attached to the main house but located a short distance from it. After two years of living in the cottage, we moved to Ghosh Building on Albert Road, in the heart of Civil Lines, where my father had set up his clinic. We would have been among the first people to live in a flat in Allahabad. Ghosh Building was built in the same year that we came to Allahabad. It was a long, flat-roofed, modern-looking building, and lacked only chimneys to make it look like a factory. At street level, after a walkway that ran along the length of the building, was a row of about a dozen large shops with glass fronts. Upstairs were flats and insurance offices. Over the decades, the shops have changed hands and new businesses have opened in them. But
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some establishments, like Kohli Photo Service, which fifty years ago was just the sort of state-of-the-art ~ h o t o ~ r a p h einr town that J.M. Patell had found to be a threat, and Indian Medical Hall, a Bengali-owned rundown chemist that even today from a considerable distance smells like an old bandage, have been there since my childhood. The clinic took up the front part of our flat, which meant that one entered the flat through the waiting-room. Behind it was a drawing-room and a dining area. The two bedrooms were to one side. Behind the dining area was a narrow balcony, at one end of which was a kitchen, whose inside was black with smoke from the chulha, and at the other a flush toilet, which was something of a novelty. The other novelty, for me, was our Electrolux refrigerator that ran on kerosene. Ghosh Building was one of several rental properties, spread across Allahabad, owned by The Indian Press. In the last one hundred and fifty years Allahabad has seen two migrations. The first began after the Mutiny of 1857 and ended a hundred years later, in the first decade after Independence. During it came the Ghoshs and the Chatterjces, the Nehrus and the Dhondys, and the Jhas and the Rudras. It made Allahabad what it was. The second migration, which began in the 1980s, has been largely a local affair; from the Black Town to the White, from Chowk to Civil Lines, from Attarsuiya to Thornhill Road. It unmade the colonial city. Like my parents, Arun Kumar had come to Allahabad towards the end of the first migration. He saw the second one coming but badly misjudged it. Instead of showing prudence and stepping out of its way, he dug in and paid the price. Allahabad has paid a price too. The second migration has dealt it a blow it is unlikely to recover from. The same forces of history that transformed it
from a nondescript provincial town into one of the premier cities of the Raj have turned it into a provincial town once again, whose unchecked gowth and collapsed civic amenities make it indistinguishable from dozens of other towns in North India. Seen in this way, Allahabad's is a terribly human story. It is a story of dust to dust, which may be one reason why some of us who live in it love it so much.
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49
against my skin. We'd sit on the embankment to dry ourselves,
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The brand new cricket bat, with Len Hutton's signature inscribed near the top of the blade, where it joins the handle, stood in a shallow pan half filled with linseed oil. The bat was supposed to soak up the oil through a tiny hole in the bottom, and I went and checked it from time to time. Seeing at the end of three days that nothing was happening, I took the bat out of the pan and vigorously rubbed the oil into it with a cotton rag. Finally, I took a cork ball and bounced it off the blade, each thud leaving a darkcoloured sunken mark on the smooth surface. Looking at the disfigured face of the bat afterwards, I almost regretted what I'd done. Whenever I made it to a cricket eleven, it was more on the strength of the equipment I brought along than for any cricketing abilities I possessed.
I don't recall my boyhood, uneventful though it was, as being particularly lonely. Without telling our parents, we'd go swimming in a lake. It was full of tall, offensive weeds that came up almost to the water's surface. We'd strip to our underpants and, from a concrete platform that abutted the lake, jump into the water. The weeds seemed to follow us around and I was afraid they might, any moment, grab hold of my leg and drag me to the bottom. I'd thrash about violently if one of them so much as brushed
then go home. The boys I played cricket with, or hockey, or soccer, or with whom I went swimming, have today become unsubstantial as ghosts. Ask me their names or what they looked like or their fathers' professions, and my mind is more or less blank. The person who still seems real from that time is someone I didn't know at all. She was a businessman's daughter I was in love with in school. We never talked, but on some pretext or other I would frequently go past her classroom, trying hard not to look in its direction; in the recess I would' follow her around; and before going to sleep at night, in the privacy of the mosquito net, the bedside lamp switched off, the pedestal fan purring, my eyes half closed, I would murmur her name to myself over and over again. But there were also nights, specially in the summer, when the full moon would creep up the window and refuse to go away, throwing its unwanted light both on the world I was about to shut out and the hidden one I wished to enter, trapping me between them. I lay as though suspended in the air. If I attempted to bring thedarkness back by covering my eyes with a pillow, the moonbeams pinned my arms down so I couldn't move. The evenings, too, went in trying to catch a glimpse ofher face, for which purpose I would go past her house on my Raleigh bicycle at regular fifteen-minute intervals. She had large black eyes, high cheekbones, sloping shoulders, wide hips, and a slow, deliberate walk. Her complexion was the colour of wheat, and often, even at home, she wore the white blouse and sky-blue skirt of the school uniform. A bicycle may be a noiseless way of getting around, but whenever I approached the street in which she lived, the tyres (as if I'd upset a basket of snakes) began to hiss, the leather saddle
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creaked, the chain rattled against the chain guard, and it felt like 1 was travelling in a fire engine instead. If there was light in her window I'd turn back and cross it a second time, all the while looking out for her cousin who was the same age as me and suspected what was going on. But he also knew that my evening routine was harmless and didn't interfere with it. Despite the hundreds ofhours spent in this pursuit, had she and I met by accident somewhere, say on a desert island, I wouldn't have known what to say to her. Her presence I was unused to, whereas her absence summoned all my latent powers. Like the pigeon that seems to exist just outside the boundaries of the magician's person, and which he makes appear simply by passing a cloth over his hand, I believed she too could be conjured up, and I was the one to do it. Sitting in class or fielding at deep third man, I'd snap my fingers and look about me to see if her languid figure had materialized, but except that words disappeared from the blackboard before I took them down or I gave away an extra run, little else happened. I realize now that I was driven not only by my infatuation with her but also by some image I had ofmyself, an image which formed only when she became the looking glass. We were living in Bhilai, a city designed by a pencil stub and a six-inch plastic ruler. It was all parallel lines. The tribal village that gave it its name was nowhere to be seen, and in its place, in the middle of the mineral-rich Deccan plateau-a region that once formed part of the hypothetical continent of Gondwanalandstood rows of mostly one-storey houses with flat concrete roofs. There were so many houses to a street, so many streets to a sector, and ten sectors made the township. At one end of this, next to the lake where we went swimming, a steel plant was being built with Soviet aid. The pencil and ruler that planned the city also drew its houses. They were toy houses really, rectangular in shape and coloured
yellow, pink, or brick red on the outside. Ours was a semidetached in Sector 10. It consisted of a living room, two ten-byten-feet bedrooms, a kitchen with a cement counter, a verandah just big enough to accommodate one rattan chair and some flowerpots, and an enclosed backyard on whose whitewashed walls no papaya tree cast its thin shadow. There still lingered in the rooms the wholesome smell of sawdust and fresh paint when we moved in, and some ofthe paint was splattered on the floor, forming strings of islands. Blobs of grey plaster clung to the window bars. You looked out and saw that for miles around there was nothing outlined against the sky. Th'e sky itselfwas flat, curvatureless, and like a weight kept pressing everything down into the earthhouses, fences, utility poles, everything. This is not all. The place had the stillness of a morgue. There was little traffic on the roads and none whatsoever in the air. No butterfly flitted past, though you could have sat in theverandah all afternoon. At such times, the only movement was that of your eyes, when they blinked; the only sound came when someone cleared a spot of phlegm from his throat, and Bandhu Ram cleared his constantly. Like a stain preserved in cloth, Bandhu Ram is preserved in the folds of my memory. Half-crouched and without making a sound, he approaches the coal enclosure behind which a chicken, that a minute ago was fluttering all over the yard, has hidden itself. Bandhu Ram was a slender dark-complexioned man who didn't speak even when spoken to. His family since his grandfather's time had worked in the kitchens of regimental messes, and from it he had inherited the art of baking vegetables, steaming puddings, and making clear soups that sometimes tasted like hot water. He used to be our cook in Allahabad and came to Bhilai with us when my father, who was a dentist, took up a job in a newly opened hospital there. Once a month he wrote to his family. Bringing me a postcard, he'd start dictating the letter, 'Bandhu Ram conveys
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his greetings to everyone . . .' The contents never varied, and soon I knew them by heart. From the doorway I had watched the chicken's flight and capture. Bandhu Ram went outside, holding the chicken upside down in one hand and a rusty knife in the other. He had his back towards me. I wanted to go and stand near him, but didn't have the courage. Then I saw him wipe the knife on the grass. Around him lay stiffwhite feathers. I was watching his face when he came in, but it was impassive, as my own must have been when afterwards at dinner I sucked on the wishbone. Unlike us, the Soviet engineers lived in air-conditioned apartments from which, when the door opened, came the smell of frying. Without realizing it, we were a nuisance to them. Every schoolboy in Bhilai was an ardent hobbyist and had picked up enough Russian to ask for postage stamps, coins, and brooches (depicting naval ships, Lenin, the hammer and sickle), and say thank you. An afternoon of knocking on doors seldom produced more than a few postage stamps, though on lucky days one or another of those oversized Soviet women would give us a onekopeck coin, and sometimes a crumpled rouble note. Limited though our contact with them was, even as children we could see that between them and us language was not the only barrier. My badminton partner in the club was a Russian. A thickset man with short hair and the grace ofa battletank, he seemed to want to crush the shuttlecock whenever he made contact. We became friends, though only on court. Off it he refused to recognize me. By and by we found out more about these strange people. We learnt they ate red meat in enormous quantities; they had bad teeth (this detail was contributed by my father); they did a lot of shopping, specially for footwear; and they put up their binoculars and cameras for sale before they left.
Though aboard the stamp album's magic carpet I made frequent visits to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and less frequent ones to Borneo, Cameroon, Formosa, Gold Coast, Madagascar, Rhodesia, Siam, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar, it was not philately or even the sight of blast furnaces and coke ovens which made the highest point of my otherwise plain boyhood. That dot on the contour map still belonged to the girl I had partly daydreamt into existence. Was I sorry to see my boyhood end? Not really, for whatever the rites depassage might say, I never did believe it had ended.
52
r
e In July 1963, just out of high school and after five years of living in a steel town, I found myself on the train back to Allahabad. No two cities could be more different. One had not yet made it to the map of India, the other had been a continuous settlement for thousands ofyears, visited by mythological heroes and ancient travellers, and mentioned in sacred texts; one adjoined a manmade lake, the other lay at the confluence of three rivers, the Ganges, the Jamuna, and the invisible Saraswati; one was small but cosmopolitan, the other large and provincial, a one-horse town of half a million souls; one was in the process of coming up, the other, described even by local journalists as a dead place, seemed content to remain in perpetual decline. I fell in with its ways almost at once. In Allahabad I had spent my childhood, attended my first school, Boys' High School, and made my first friends-some of whom I was eager to see again-so my return was more like a homecoming.The city's tree-lined roads and high-ceilinged colonial bungalows were as familiar to me as the night sky is to a stargazer.
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In a poem written while pacing up and down a studio at Yaddo in the summer of 1972 I discovered, quite by chance, that local history and private memory are intersecting lines.
on 'Horace Walpole and the English Novel: A Study of the Influence of The Castle of Otrunto 1764-1820'; he also fell in love with a n Erlglish girl, Phyllis Ravenscroft, and decided to marry her. In the late forties Uncle Kelly showed the first signs of multiple sclerosis, a disease thar severely disabled him for the
At seven-thirty we are sent home From the Cosmopolitan Club, My farher says, 'No bid,' My mother forgets her hand In a deck of cards. I sit on the railing rill midnight, Above a worn sign That advertises a dentist.
I go to sleep after I hear him Snore like the school bell. I'm standing alone in a back alley And a face I can never rccollect is removing The hubcaps of our dull brown Ford. The first words I mumble are the names of roads, Thornhill, Hastings, Lytton . . .
remaining twenty years ofhis life. During this period Aunt Phyllis ('More devoted to her husband than any Indian woman') functioned as an extension of his limbs. Together with a battalion of loyal, light-fingered, hierarchy-conscious servants, she bathed, dressed, and fed Uncle Kelly, drove him to the university and pushed his wheelchair, chasedaway the mosquitoes that settled on his arm, and turned the pages of the book he was reading. But it was Aunt Phyllis alone who got ;p two or three times each night, and, seeing that hewas tired oflying in one position, gently turned him on the other side. Uncle Kelly and Aunt Phyllis lived in 20 Hastings Road. To my parents they had written saying that for the three years I would be going to college and university they expected me to stay with them and not in a s t ~ d e ~ thostel, s' so on reaching ~ l l a h a b a dit
The roads are now called after Hindu nationalists or provincial leaders, but their new names are far less resonant, good only for
was to Hastings Road thar I asked the rickshaw to take me. T h e bungalow I entered I'd often visited as a child. Built in typical
aiding postmen. I cannot imagine any child reciting them.
colonial style, it was set in the midst ofextensive g o u n d s in which
Atop a bookcase in my room is a photograph showing three rows of solemn-faced Allahabad University students, Class of
grew neem, custard-apple, jackfruit, guava, and jujube-berry
'28. The men are all wearing jackets, their trousers are tight and narrow, and some are wearing caps; the women are in white saris,
a patch of brown. All day a blind gardener, sprinkling can in
their heads covered. I've never paid much attention to the photo-
the entire front ofthe house. The bedrooms were large and airless and lay on either side of the living room. Each dressing room had
graph, and were it not for its wooden frame, a floral design carved along the edges, and one slender bespectacled figure standing in the back row, fourth from left, I would have thrown it away He is Kewal Krishna, my father's elder brother. After raking his degree, he went to Keble College, Oxford, and wrote a dissertation
trees. In one corner was a dusty badminton court. The lawn was hand, moved among the flower beds. A wide verandah ran along
a chest ofdrawers into which went everything from torn tablecloths and runners to used copybooks. In my earliest memory of the place there was a thunderbox near the bathroom window, and though a toilet bowl had replaced it, nothing else had changed.
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T h e heavy brass tap was still there in the wall, and under it stood a metal bucket and dipper. From time to time there issued from the tap a thin trickle of water. Termites had eaten away the doorframes, and during the rains it was not unusual to find a snake leaving the bathroom. Less disconcerting was the presence around the house of vagrant cows. They wandered in through the front gate and destroyed what little garden there was. Sometimes a cow was caught and tied to a tree, and an excited Aunt Phyllis would wait for the claimant to turn up. Ifby evening none did, the animal was given a few kindly whacks and released. My favourite room in the house was the study. Neither of my parents was fond ofreading, and except for those condensed by the Reader's Digest I had not known many books in Bhilai. Afterwards, when my father became interested in Hindu religion and philosophy, commentaries on the Gita and the paperback lives of sundry saints, mystics, yogis, and gurus were added to the memoirs of field marshals and the accounts of World War I1 naval battles. We also possessed some books on shikar, a three-volume set of Somerset Maugham's stories, a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte printed in double columns, and Gray's Anatomy. As a boy, the only book I consulted was Anatomy. It always opened on the page containing an illustration of the female pudendum, and I dipped into it whenever my parents were out of the house. The study was where, during winters, Uncle Kelly took his morning tea, and where he received visitors. Tall bookcases lined the walls, and someone gifted with a sensitive nose could also catch the dry smell of foxed paper and calf bindings in which diligent maggots had bored tunnels. Behind thesafetyofundusted uniform editions lay clusters of identical taw-sized gecko eggs. In
a 40-watt electric bulb, I surveyed the enemy, books. My illplanned raids into that articulate territory never came to very much, and I soon felt defeated. The truth is that even before I could acquaint myselfwith the titles of the books that surrounded me, I became impatient to write one. Looking out of the dressing room window at the row of yellow oleanders outside, their leaves wet with rain, or while turning the virgin pages ofan economics or a geography textbook, I would dream of publishers' imprints, of a spine and title page with my name on them. It was as though the tongue had acquired a new taste, and so it had. One day I found it saying,
one corner was kept an easy chair, and sitting in it I felt like a general on horseback. From that coign of vantage, in the light of
The first poem was something given, something received. It wrote itself. I then wrote several more. It was as though I had lifted
56
Four hundred miies away, Beyond many moons you stay. These lines, which completely took me by surprise, were addressed to the businessman's daughter in Bhilai. There is another photograph. It is pasted on a student ID card and bears the signature of the proctor ofGovernment Intermediate College, Allahabad, in one corner. I thought I'd lost the card, indeed I'd forgotten all about it, when the other day it waylaid me again. Taken in 1963, the year I returned to Allahabad, the photograph shows a smooth-chinned sixteen-year-old who is half man and half boy. His thick black hair is neatly parted, and he is wearing a white Terylene shirt and a narrow tie. But hold the photograph at a distance, and you'll see the boy's confidence comes from inexperience, that behind the pleasant door-to-door salesman's face is the face of a narcissist. Nothing seems further from his mind than writing poetry, and yet it is just the kind of thing he might do very soon.
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the sticky lid of a tin box and the brown-winged insects breed-
whether it be somebody's senile grandfather who daubed his
ing inside had rushed out, their numbers such that I thought I wouldn't see the last of them. The poems brought about a change
clothes with Dettol before he put them on; or an honest classmate whose ambition in life was to join the civil service; or a puffy-faced
in my appearance. I was writing, but I was also being written. T h e
university lecturer ofwhom it was said that, once a month, leaving
change happened slowly and over a ~ e r i o dof time, at the end of which it was visible to everyone except me that whereas others wore clothes, drab everyday shirts and trousers, I went about in costumes. Ochre cotton had replaced white Terylene. The Royal typewriter I used was my maternal grandfather's gift to my parents. Bought secondhand in Simla from an Englishman
his wife and three small children at home, he dined by himself in
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Kwality's restaurant and smoked a Gold Flake cigarette afterwards. We looked at them, as we did at ourselves, with unsparing eyes. O u r attitude of rebellion was shaped by our reading, just as much as it was reflected in the books we read. T h e word 'phoney' had entered our vocabulary through The Catcher in the Rye, and when we were not trying to sp&k like Holden Caulfield, we
who was selling his effects prior to leaving the country, it was a portable model that had the weight of a saddle quern and came in a high black case. When I thought I had accumulated enough
recited passages from Penguin Modern Poets 5, where, for the first time, we had come across poems that were funny, clever, sad,
poems to fill a small volume, I typed them up and took the pages to the nearest bindery. Two days later the mournful-looking cloth-
irreverent, and though written in a style that looked as natural and easy as breathing, left us in a state of euphoria-Gregory Corso's
bound object I held in my hand was narrower than a paperback
'Marriage', Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 'Underwear', and Allen Gins-
and barely possessed a spine, it had neither jacket nor publisher's
berg's 'America'.
imprint, and yet bore some resemblance to a book of poems. I brought it home and hid it between the college textbooks on economics and geography.
Perhaps not so surprisingly, the ineffable longings of Rabindranath Tagore and Kahlil Gibran-and not the profanities of the
In the house adjacent to ours, similar to it architecturally but
group of five poems, titled 'The Soundless Flute', in the March 1965 issue of the Allahabad University Magazine.
Beat generation-prompted
with a tile roof and bigger windows, lived my closest friend, Arnit Rai. H e and I would stand on either side of the low wall that sepa-
Let not the cloud remain and dirty the sky, let it not shade the sun, let it not be tossed about by the wind or be pecked by the birds. Let it merge into the bigger cloud that will carry it with its own strength, or else let it rain and die.
rated our compounds and talk for hours. Alongside the wall grew e d their trunks hidden by the underbush. large, t h i ~ k l ~ f o l i a g trees, Getting to the wall was not easy, and you had to hack your way through a tangle of branches. Once there, amidst the trees and closely planted shrubs, it was like being inside a tropical forest. I'his forest often rang with laughter. We laughed for no reason at all, and there was nothing we didn't laugh at. We once laughed at a man merely because he was bald and drove a grey car. H e was a phoney, which is what we felt about most people we knew,
my first published work. This was a
,
'
I
~
I wrote about twelve such poems in all, and learnt a few things about poetry I didn't know before. I came to know that you could say the most trivial things in it, but they would still come out sounding like profound truths, or at least to my ears they did. O n e humid September afternoon, some six months after the
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poems appeared, as Amit and I were bicycling down from the uni-
conventions and partly of being with the times, for poems that used capital letters looked so old-fashioned. My handwriting kept changing. There were several styles to choose from, and I tried all of them out. I'd adopt a schoolgirl's round hand one week, then give it up for flat angular strokes that I thought suited me better, or else, in imitation of Aunt Phyllis, add a little flourish to the letters, a flowing curve that made them look like birds in flight. For the poems likewise there were models (Tagore, Gibran, and a score of others), and I served my apprenticeship copying them, and sometimes failing to, as happened with X.J. Kennedy's 'Nude Desce'nding a Staircase', which I first read in Donald Hall's Contemporary American Poetry anthology. I would on occasion catch myself humming it, but the rhythmic modulations that made it so hummable also made it difficult to imitate. I had one go at the poem and did not try a second time. The models I followed had little in common. They belonged to different traditions, and if to the same tradition to different schools. This eclecticism came with the discovery itself, for having stumbled upon the kingdom of verse I was impatient to explore its several regions, even the most remote, and inhabit each as my native place. Though which treacherous region I was exploring in these nine lines is anybody's guess:
60
versity, the thought came to us to start a magazine. In an issue of the Village Voice, sent by his maternal uncle, Vijay Chauhan, from New York, we had read about Fuck Youla magazine o f the arts. We now decided to steal the name for ourselves, modifying it slightly. Amit's father, a publisher, had converted a part of the front verandah ofhis house into an office. In it, among the wooden tables and chairs, stood a Gestetner mimeographing machine, covered in dust and seldom used. We had it cleaned and learnt how to operate it. After applying ink from a large tube to the roller, we rotated the drum a few times to let the ink spread evenly. We then fastened the stencil, fed the paper, and watched nervously as the printed sheets rolled out. The first number of d a m n youla magazine o f the arts contained ten pages and had a pale green cover. It carried poems by its three editors, the third editor being Amit's brother, Alok.The back cover mentioned the price, which was 'Anything commensurate with your dignity-and ours', and gave the address, 18 Hastings Road, Allahabad. There was also an editorial, called 'Statement', in which, while putting a brave face on it, we nevertheless confessed to the misdemeanour of writing and selling verse. what about? long-term policy? general objectives? that's not even funny. besides, we wouldn't know. the basic point is that all of us write-more or less-and would like being read. hence dy. this statement is here because we thought we might explain rhingsalittle before flingingpoetryatyou.who knows, perhaps it is needed. theexplanation or the flinging? dy shall be issued as frequently (or seldom) as we feel, what is more, we'll even try and get some money off you for it. the financial benefits are not meant for ourselves, poor boys' fund. vietnam. (beforeyou pigeonhole us, we didn't specify which side.) Not just the editorial, but almost everything else in the magazine was printed in lower case. This was partly a matter of breaking
my breath flees downward
down butterfly hill the red rocks and the blue rocks it meets and kisses my breath bleeds to pieces on the white rocks below
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Reading through damn youfi again, it appears that my role in it was to strike anguished poses and Amit's to write the poems. Their manner is not derivative and their themes, unlike mine, have less to do with the artificial wilderness beloved of artistic souls and more with the time and place we lived in. H e wrote about young people having fun at a party, a sixth-century Buddhist site near Allahabad, a dead paratrooper.
reminded of it. Though our age, they were already grown-up rnen, preparing to enter their fathers' professions or professions their fathers had chosen for them. Their future looking secure, they sometimes worried about the world's. O u r obsession was poetry, and the world, we found, has only one side, the funny side. For the rest, Amit and I were like other students, conscientious and keen to do well. Admitted to the University ofAllahabad in July 1964, we were required to take three subjects and pursue them for two years. Both of us offered English (a play each by Shakespeare, Shaw, and Galsworthy, and Romantic and Victorian poetryJ and ancient history, and while Amit took philosophy I had economics as the third subject. We didn't much care for history, ancient or any other, but took it all the same because the subject was 'scoring', which is to say the examiners were believed to be liberal, awarding high marks to every script they read. (In contrast, those in medieval history and political science were well known for being stingy.) Scoring in ancient history was easier said than done, for the next thing we learnt was that the marks awarded depended on the length of the answers rather than what was written in them. The first ten weeks of classes did little to kindle our interest in the ancient world. We realized that what the lecturers were telling us we could find out on our own in half the time. Moreover, who could have wanted to hear about the Hittites, say, when there was a roomful of lovely provincial girls with freshly talcumed faces to look at? They would troop into the classroom, sit in the area reserved for them, listen to the lecture, and troop out without our getting a clue to where they came from and where they went. Finally, I made eye contact with one of the girls, a plain-looking heavenly creature with thick black eyebrows and a low forehead. Having repeated the contact over many days, and having noticed
62
is it not beautiful
to come billowing down in silk what your little son would tell the ncighbour's boy if he saw you do it and he can't where is your comrade who got pleasure from making paper dolls and he who yet felt happy when any said he needed a shave parachute trouble machine gun trouble dead. dead . . . can you imagine eyelids that won't blink when the raindrops drop on them We couldn't have brought out more than a hundred copies of the first issue. I took one to Uncle Kelly. who, when he saw what the magazine was called, raised his eyebrows, a wrinkle of disapproval forming on his forehead. Then he looked up, and his face broke into the thinnest ofsmiles. O n e or two English Department lecturers we knew bought copies and said 'Damn you' as they paid for it, but most of our friends just stared at us in disbelief and walked away. Writing poetry belonged to the phase of their lives they had sidestepped altogether, and they had no wish to be
6.3
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that her eyes lingered over me just as mine did over her, I lucked up courage and asked her for a book. It was the beginning of a romance. I started going over to her place, and as the months the visits became more frequent. She lived with her old parents in a large two-storey house that had countless small rooms, and as soon as she and I were inside one of them we behaved as if her parents were not just old but also deaf, blind, and crippled. Amit would be kept informed of these developments. At home, after returning from the university, he and I would kick a ball around or play a game of badminton, and when i t grew dark stand near the boundary wall and talk into the evening, till one of Aunt Phyllis's servants came and said dinner was on the table or we heard the ayah call out to Amit. Reluctantly, we would leave the strip of forest that lay on either side of the wall and go into our lighted bungalows. Though the BA Part I exams were not until the following summer, we had begun studying for them in all seriousness. Perhaps studying is the wrong word to describe what we did, for most of our time went in making 'notes'. This was true about history particularly. The history syllabus covered both ancient India and the ancient world, and while books on ancient India were available in every shop and kiosk, and under every tree in University Road, those on the ancient world were hard to come by. O u r familiarity with them did not go beyond knowing their authors' names, which, presumably, were British or American, and their resounding titles, such as The Conquest of Civilization. The handful of teachers and students who possessed copies scarcely wanted to lend them out, and if they did it was only for a few days. So making notes in fact meant copying at high speed whole chapters in longhand, the drudgery made worse by the condition of the books, whose every page was heavily underlined in red pencil or
royal blue ink, usually in both, and whose margins had 'Imp' scribbled in them. Since one person, however fast he copied, could not copy everything, Amit and I had decided to divide the work. H e took responsibility for half the syllabus and I for the remaining half. I spent the autumn vacation in October with my parents, taking the 3 Up Howrah-Bombay Mail out of Allahabad and reaching Bhilai twenty-eight hours later, after two changes. The Royal typewriter now went everywhere with me, and I was carrying it when I got down from the train. Though not intending to write any poems, I still wanted ts have the machine around, just in case. In Bhilai I received two letters from Amit. 'Vinoo dear (I don't mean it)', the first letter began (Vinoo is my nickname), 'By God! What notes! What notes? Egypt. Great. Burns, Breasted, Swain, Finger. And this bloody Egypt is worth at least two other civilizations, so please add one more civ to your list. Well, I'm not working too hard . . . I play 3 solid hours of squash every day.' Immediately after this he writes, 'In ancient India I have completed religious movements of Gth century BC. Will proceed further. What about you? Going solider than ever?' In all his letters to me Amit would have something to say about Peeks, as Piyush Kanta Verma was called. The three of us had known each other from the time we were in Boys' High School, where Peeks and I, aged nine and eight respectively, had fought for the hand of an elf-like seven-year-old Anglo-Indian girl, June Cearns. T h e son of a high court judge, I never saw him speak to his father without first rising to attention, and Amit and I were convinced that he also sirred him. He later went into the civil service, to nobody's surprise. Peeks wasn't interested in literature and didn't write poetry. Nevertheless, he saw nothing wrong with those who did. Like us, he had spent the vacation transcribing
64
65
67
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books. 'Peeks isgoingverysolid', Amit wrote, and signed the letter ' ~ ~ Raj l Anand k (author of Crozus and Pigeorzs).'
distance. We took salt tablets with breakfast to prevent sunstroke. It was the middle of summer and examination time.
After four days, on 13 October, he wrote to me again. 'You don't really expect me to believe,' he said, referring to my economics course, 'that you have done only Indian population, do you? I
T h e changing season saw us change too. Ifwe still mec near the
66
have completed Egypt today. I move over to prehistory. Brother Peeks is going super-super-solid . . . By the way, I am glad you have given up heavy prose. Your poem is horrible-what about the other one?' O f the poem I have no recollection. Was it about adolescence in the unrestrained voice of adolescence? O r a piece of shamming, a pseudo-poem, a laboured imitation of an ad-
boundary wall, it was to assess how well we were prepared for the exams, the thought ofwhich made us rush back to our desks. We slept less, and at odd hours, and when awake had our eyes glued to books, continuing to read even at the dining table, during meals. Quite apart from the hundreds of pages that had to be crammed, we had dates in history and quotations in English (Graham Hough and Maurice Bowra on the Romantics, A.C.
mired work? O r something composed in a frenzy, supernaturally inspired, as though dictated from above? But whatever it was, his
Ward on Shaw) to commit to fiemory. And on top of this I had economics to cope with, a subject I felt remote from and which it had been a mistake to offer. We studied selectively of course,
letter when it came that day thirty years ago must have made me
like everyone else. There were parts of the syllabus we left out
quite miserable.
and others we mugged up, depending on the 'guess papers' in
Suddenly the neem trees looked very bare. Their scythe-shaped leaves fell in ones and twos, then in great masses, the wind scattering them all over the compound. T h e sweeperwoman with her twig-broom would go about collecting the leaves into small heaps, which she would burn. New shoots appeared overnight on the branches. T h e heat continued to get worse. We opened the sky-
each subject. To make a guess paper we scrutinized the previous ten years' questions, available in inexpensive booklets with flimsy pink or yellow covers on University Road, and after taking into account the hints dropped by teachers and the gossip among students, and after listening to our own inner voices, we drew up a list of questions that were likely to be asked.
lighrs, but they only let in more hot air. T h e ceiling fans, even at
Peeks went a step further and enlisted divine help. H e arrived
top speed, rotated slowly.Whiskey, Aunt Phyllis's ancient Pomeranian bitch, repaired into a bathroom for most of the day. By the
on the morning of the first exam wearing a tilak on his forehead, and it looked as though he had come straight from a temple.
second week ofApril the beds were out and we were sleeping in the
Conveniently, the temple was located inside his house. It was like
lawn, under mosquito nets. Dew had fallen and inside the nets the white sheets were cool. Lines of camels passed, headed for
any other room in it, but furnished with the pictures of gods and
the river, where they were loaded with watermelons. A pleasant
goddesses instead of almirahs and beds, and the tilak was ap-
breeze would blow, though not for long. The nights were getting
plied by his mother. It only took a minute, Peeks said, and could do no harm.
shorter and with sunrise, when the same camels made the return
I was in Bhilai when the results were declared. There was a brief
journey, the heat started building up again. By nine the roads
telegram from Uncle Kelly followed by a letter from Amit, giving details. T h e letter is undated, but was written in the first week of
would be deserted and whoever ventured out saw mirages in the
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July 1965. 'And what a huge fake it is', he wrote, 'that ancient history is more scoring than medieval history. We both did our papers very well, and yet you just get 100 [out of a maximum of 150 marks] and I 96. Peeks [who had medieval history] mucks up one question solid and generally has poorer preparation, and slogs 1 12!' The letter contains one more surprise, the marks of the girl with the thick black eyebrows and a low forehead. She got 122. Since that day I have mistrusted examination results and had a little more faith in the influencing power of framed oleographs. In English and philosophy also, Amit's marks were less than what he expected. In the letter he sounded lonely and despondent, which was unusual for him, and asked me to return to Allahabad sooner than I would have normally. 'Vinoo, even though the university opens late can't you come back early? I miss you a lot. Even Peeks is not here.' Greatly disappointed though we were with the results, we were too young, too alive, too disdaining of authority to let them affect us for long. At the same time, even if unknown to ourselves, we were trusting and innocent, still very much the boys who stand first in class and on Annual Day walk away with all the prizes. When the university reopened we resumed copying chapters out of textbooks. As resolutely as on ancient Egypt earlier, we now started making notes on Greece and Rome. We were in BA Part 11. T h e two lives we led, of ambitious terrestrial students and rebellious subterranean poets, continued to run side by side and on the whole peacefully, one part of us concentrating on the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the Punic Wars, the rise of the Guptas, the significance of the opening scene in Macbeth, and the other reading the Village Voice and declaiming 'Underwear' ('Women's underwear holds things up1 Men's underwear holds things down') and 'America' ('America when will you send your
eggs to India') from Penguin Modern Poets 5. According to the date below my signature in the title page, I had bought the book in August 1965. That September we had brought out the first issue of damn you. Even we realized that the magazine, if it was to continue, would need contributions from poets other than its editors. O u r difficulty was that sitting in Hastings Road, Allahabad, we didn't know where to look for them. T h e English poets we were familiar with were the sort who have their monuments in Westminster Abbey, and it did not occur to us that we could ask Indian poets to contribute. This left the United States, a country just fifty yards down the road, at whose entrance stood not the famous statue but a bright red letter box nailed to a neem tree. Into it Amit dropped an aerogramme addressed to Vijay Chauhan in New York. Vijay, or Chhote Bhaiya (Younger Brother) as every-body called him, was at the time studying international relations at Columbia University on a Fulbright. H e was a short compact-looking man, with large bulging eyes, a carefully trimmed beard, and a receding hairline. H e wore blue jeans andT-shirts, smoked Charminar cigarettes, and liked his rum, which he poured out ofasilver hip flask. He was a bachelor. At Sagar University where he taught ~oliticalscience and directed contemporary American plays for an amateur group, he was seen by some as an oddball, whereas to others, his students mostly, he was a hero figure. He was certainly one to us. Amit's letter to him, written on 30 October, reads, in part:
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69
We are now getting down to the second issue of dy and are trying to increase its scope. You once said that there were some magazines in theVillagewhosecontributors would have no objection to contributing to LIS also. Rut that is not the point ofthis letter. You also said you had the addresses of these magazines. Rut even that, ifyou ask me, is nor
70
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the point of this letter. Ifyou can, will you please send us the addresses of these people. Early in November, just days after he posted the letter, Amit fell
PEEKS! My muse is awake. First the first verseremember in november
ill. H e came out of the philosophy class complaining ofpain in his arms and went home. T h e pain persisted and a blood test was done, after which the doctor treating him suggested he be taken to Bombay where better diagnostic facilities were available. In a stream of letters he wrote from there, Amit sent us an almost day by day account of his illness. 'My disease is to be finally diagnosed on Tuesday,' he wrote to Peeks and myself on 17November in one of his first letters. 'They took the live marrow from my bones to test and boy! did it pain. AmmiIMamma [his parents] are worried, but curiously it did not matter to me much whether I had cancer or no. I am somewhat having the Kay Kendall feeling, the difference being that I know everything.' Seven months later, on 2 1 June 1966, in Bombay's Tata Memorial Hospital, three weeks after his eighteenth birthday, Amit died of leukaemia. His last letter, to Peeks, was written o n 9 June. Dear Piyush, I have not written for so long because I was in no physical condition to write. I have recently been subject to very severe pains and have lived my last few days under morphia. I don't write this to get sympathy-but to make a thoroughly silly sentimental confession.You remember in November (note the rhyme) I said cancer does not make any difference to me. Believe me I was sincere, but now 1beg to withdraw the statement. Vinoo was here today and said quote grotesque rumours weregoing throughAllahabad unquote. Itwas his unominous way ofsaying that people in Allahabad were already convinced that I was dead. Well I am not deadas yet andstill I am not so frightfullykeen to survive. No emotions involved, what I want is a decision one way or the other. 'One way' would be preferable, but 'the other' too is fine by me.
and then the singularly rhyming one Amit Rai is going to die . . . I'll cry . . . I'll try . . . 0 BROTHER! I'm still a poet after all.
.
There had in those seven months been a brief period of about eight weeks, from the end of February to the end of April, when Amit returned to Allahabad. Looking at him, one could hardly say anything was wrong. We laughed and talked as before, and he joked about all the phoney sympathetic letters he had received in Bombay. H e stayed away from the university for the same reason, to avoid meeting people who would ask about his health. Some of them, since I was a friend of his, would come and ask me, and I would shrug them off, believing Amit had been cured. O n e way of shutting up these solicitous people, we thought, would be to bring out the second issue of damn you. It appeared that March, without the Greenwich Village poets but in a new A4 format. O n the cover it said 'poems & sketches', and inside were contributions by the editors and their relatives and friends. There was a story, 'Lucky Horace', by Amit's cousin Sara, aged ten; an oil company slogan, 'I'll put a tiger in your tank', became the first line of a pastiche by Vijay Chauhan; and there were haiku-like verses and imitations of T.S. Eliot by the less philistine of our university friends. Amit had a poem on a family picnic ('my brother alone half-heartedly sings / yippi yippi yai'), and I contributed a reflection in poetic prose on the human
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condition. I had no sorrows to speak of, yet always wrote as
Program. Not many passengers had got down at Cedar Rapids, so
though I had been stabbed through the heart. It played havoc with my grammar. Among the sketches one showed a nude woman lying inside a bubble, and the acknowledgement below it said 'Courtesy: Bugger.' It was meant to shock. T h e price of damn
it wasn't difficult for him to identi@ us, two tired foreigners who
72
73
were looking a bit lost. We put our bags in his station wagon and sped off towards Iowa City. Night having fallen, we saw little ofthe landscape. I did not know that, even had it been daylight, there
you/2 was one rupee.
would still be little to see. Elliott brought us to an apartment
There were to be four more issues of the magazine before it ceased publication in 1968.T h e sixth issue listed in the back some
building called Mayflower, and said he'd be back after an hour to
of the little magazines and small presses that exchanged with us,
side Iowa City, in Coralville, and were joined there by the emigre
BB Books, Trace, University of Tampa Poetry Review, Wormwood Review, Elizabeth, dust books, Manhattan Review, open skull, El Corno Emplumado, Hyphid, Iconlatre, Openings Press, Hors Commerce Press, Camel? Coming, Beloit PoetryJournal, Loveletter, South Florida Poetryjournal, Outcast, Klactoveedsedsteen, Broadside
Czech novelist Arnost Lustig and his wife Vera. T h e food was
Press, Smyrna Press, Poetry Australia, Poetry XIChange, Tornado. For years afterwards, university libraries abroad would write asking for back issues of damn you for their special collections, but our calf-time was behind us and their letters remained unanswered.
take us out for dinner. We went to a Chinese restaurant just out-
unfamiliar, but more than this, Caralville seemed to be an unreal sort of place. Too many red and green neon signs, too few people, almost no noise, and no permanent residents or buildings. Next morning, my first morning in America, as I emerged from a bank at the corner of North Dubuque and Washington, I heard someone call out 'Vee-noo'. I froze on the sidewalk, and the same instant plunged down a shaft of time, passing certain gateposts, bungalows, armchairs, verandahs, treetops, as I fell. Then I saw Arnost. H e was standing some twenty yards away, outside a drugstore, chuckling to himself. I remembered his asking me at dinner the previous evening if my friends in Allahabad ad-
The Ozark Airlines plane that took my wife and me from Chicago
dressed me by another name. By calling that name out now, he had onlywished to make me feel at home. As I walked towards Arnost,
to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was no bigger than a Greyhound bus and
Washington Street merged into Hastings Road, and there was a
less comfortable. The flight was short, but that is not the only
neem tree near where he stood. I wondered then if some of us can
reason why for the first time in forty-eight hours I breathed a
ever leave the places we've grown up in.
little more easily. A t leastplanes like these don't crash, I remember telling myself, and indeed the aircraft seemed to cover the distance without leaving the ground. Coming inside the airport lounge, we were met by Elliott Anderson from the University of Iowa's International Writing
Death o f a Poet
Death of a Poet
Arun Kolatkar, who is widely regarded as one of the great Indian poets of the last century, was born in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, in 1931. His father was an educationist, and after a stint as the prin-
Bernini and Michelangelo, and I spent long hours spellbound by their art. But at the same time I must make a confession. T h e European girls disappointed me. They have beautiful faces, great figures, and they showed it all. But there was nothing to see. I looked blankly at their smooth, creaseless, and apparently scratch-resistant crotches, sighed, and moved on to the next picture. T h e boys, too. They let it all hang out, but were hardly what you might call well-hung. David, for example. Was it David? Great muscles, great body, but his penis was like a tiny little mouse. Move on. Next picture.
.
cipal ofa local school he taught at a teacher's training college in the same city. 'He liked nothing better in life than to meet a truly
75
After matriculating in 1947, Kolatkar attended art school in Kolhapur, and, in 1949, joined the Sir J.J. School ofArt in Bom-
unteachable object', Kolatkar once said about him. In an unpublished autobiographical essay which he read at the Festival of India in Stockholm in 1987, Kolatkar describes the house in
bay (now Mumbai). H e abandoned it two years later, mid-way through the course, but went back in 1957, when he completed
Kolhapur where he spent his first eighteen years:
the assignments and, finally, took the diploma in painting. T h e
I grew up in a house with nine rooms that were arranged, well almost, like a house of cards. Five in a row on the ground, topped by three on the first, and one on the second floor. T h e place wasn't quite as cheerful as playing cards, though. O r as colourful. All the rooms had mudfloors which had to be plastered with cowdung every week to keep them in good repair. All the walls were painted, or rather distempered, in some indeterminate colour which I can only describe as a lighter shade of sulphurous yellow.
It was in one ofthese rooms-his
father's study on the first floor-
that Kolatkar found 'a hidden treasure'. It consisted of
same year he joined Ajanta Advertising as visualizer, and quickly established himself in the profession which, in 1989, inducted him into the hall of fame for lifetime achievement. Kolatkar also led another life, and took great care to keep the two lives separate. His poet friends were scarcely aware of the advertising legend in their midst, for he never spoke to them about his prize-winning ad campaigns or the agencies he did them for. His first poems started appearing in English and Marathi magazines in the early 1950s and he continued to write in both languages for the next fifty years, creatingtwo independent and equally significant bodies ofwork. Occasionally he made jottings, in which he wond-
three or four packets ofglossy blackand white picture postcards showing the monuments and architectural marvels of Greece, as well as sculptures from the various museums of Italy and France. As I sat in my father's chair, examining the contents of his drawers, it was inevitable that I should've been introduced to the finest achievements of Baroque atid Renaissance art, the works of people like
ered about the strange bilingual creature he was:
I have a pen in my possession which writes in 2 languages and draws in one
76
Death of a Poet
Partial Recall My pencil is sharpened at both ends I use one end to write in Marathi rhe orher in English
It isn't another temple, he said, it's just a cowshed. ('Manohar')
what I wrire with one end comes our as English what I write with the other comes our as Mararhi His first book in English,jejuri, a sequence ofthirty-one poems based on a visit to a temple town of the same name near Pune, appeared in 1976 to instant acclaim, winning the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and establishing his international reputation. The main attraction of Jejuri is the Khandoba temple, a folk god popular with the nomadic and pastoral communities of Maharashtra and north Karnataka. Though Kolatkar is an unbeliever and does not hide it, the tone, bemused, seemingly offhand, is far from mocking. O n the contrary, he is divinely rapt by everything he sees, as much by the faith of the pilgrims who come to worship at Jejuri's shrines as by the shrines themselves, one of which happens to be not a shrine at all: The door was open. Manohar thought Ir was one more temple. He looked inside. Wondering which god he was going to find. He quickly turned away when a wide eyed calf looked back ar him.
After the success of jejuri, except for the odd poem in a magazine, Kolatkar did not publish anything. To friends who visited him, he would sometimes read from whatever he was working on at the time, but there were to be no further volumes. Then in July 2004 he brought out Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra. At a function held at the yational Centre for the Performing Arts' Little Theatre in Bombay, five poets read from the two books. Kolatkar, wearing a black T-shirt and brown corduroy trousers, sat in the audience. He was by then terminally ill with stomach cancer and did not have long to live. To his readers it must have seemed at the time, as it did to me, that the publication of these long awaited new books by Kolatkar, twenty-eight years after he published jejuri, completed his English oeuvre. There were some scattered uncollected poems of course, most notably the long poem 'the boatride', but they had appeared in magazines ('the boatride' in the last issue of damn you) and anthologies before and in any case were not enough to make another full-length collection. Which is why when Ashok Shahane, Kolatkar's publisher, first brought up the idea of The Boatride a n d o t h e r Poems and asked me to draw up a list of things to include in it I was sceptical. In the event, the list, based on what was available on my shelves, did not look as meagre as I had feared. It had thirty-two poems divided into three sections: 'Poems in English', which had poems written originally in English; 'Poems in Marathi', which had poems written originally in Marathi but which he translated into English; and 'Translations', which had translations of Marathi bhakti poets, mostly of Tukaram.
78
Death of a Poet
Partial Recall The first poem in the first section was 'The Renunciation of the
Dog', written in 1953. A poem titled 'A Prostitute on a Pilgrim-
widely distributed throughout India, for which he felt 'daisies' was not the right equivalent. Here is the poem:
age to Pandharpur Visits the Photographer's Tent During the Annual Ashadhi Fair', from his Marathi book Chirimiri, was from the1980s. The Boatride and Other Poems, I remember thinking to myself, though small in terms of the number of pages, would be the only book to represent all the decades of Kolatkar's writing life barring the last and the only one to have, between the same
Bombay made me a beggar. Kalyan gave me a lump of jaggery to suck. In a small village that had a waterfall but no name my blanket found a buyer and I feasted o n just plain ordinary water.
covers, his English and Marathi poems. Kolatkar approved of the selection when we discussed it over the phone and made one sug-
I arrived in Nasik with
gestion, which was to put 'the boatride' not with the 'Poems in
peepul leaves between my teeth. There I sold my Tukaram to buy myself some bread and mince. W h e n I turned off Agra Road, one of my sandals gave u p the ghost.
English', as I had done, but at the end of the book, in a section of its own. The reason for this, though he did not say it in so many words, was that in its overall structure, which is that of a trip or journey described from the moment ofsetting out to the moment of return, and in its observer's tone, 'the boatride', though written ten years earlier, prefigures jejuri, his next sequence. A week or two after this conversation when next I spoke with Kolatkar he surprised me by saying that I should edit TheBoatride. Since the book's contents had already been decided and there were no further poems to add, or at least none that I was aware of,
I gave myself a good bath in a little stream. I knocked on the first door I came upon, asked for a handout, and left the village. I sat down under a tree, hungry no more but thirsty like never before.
my role at the time, as editor, seemed limited to ensuring that we
I gave my name et cetera
had a good copy-text. But even this, I realized, would not be easy.
to a man in a bullock cart who hated beggars and quoted Tukaram, but who, when we got t o his farm later, was kind enough to give me a cool drink of water.
There was one poem, 'TheTurnaround', about which Kolatkar had in the past expressed reservation, and I wondered if I should use it as it stood. In 1989, when Daniel Weissbort and I were editing Periplus: Poetry in Translation (1993), I had asked Kolatkar for unpublished translations of his Marathi poems. He had shown me 'The Turnaround' on that occasion, but, unhappy about one word in it, 'daisies', had asked me not to include it in
Periplus. T h e Marathi had vishnukranta, a common wild flower
79
Then came Rotegaon where I went on trial and had to drag the carcass away when howling all night
80
Death of a Poet
Partial Recall a dog died in the temple where I was trying to get some sleep.
My tinshod hegira was hotting up.
There I got bread to eat all right but a woman was pissing. I didn't see her in the dark and she just blew up. Bread you want you motherfucker you blind cunt, she said, 1'11 give you bread.
T h e station two miles ahead of me, the town three miles behind, I stopped to straighten my dhoti that had bunched up in my crotch when sweat stung my eyes and I could see.
I could smell molasses boiling in a field. I asked for some sugarcane to eat. I shat on daisies and wiped my arse with neem leaves. I found a beedi lying on the road and put it in my pocket. It was walk walk walk and walk all the way. It was a year of famine. I saw a dead bullock. I crossed a hill. I picked up a small coin from a temple on top of that hill. Kopargaon is a big town. That's where I read that Stalin was dead. Kopargaon is a big town where it seemed shameful to beg. And I had to knock on five doors to get half a handful of rice.
A low fence by the roadside. A clean swept yard. A hut. An old man. A young woman in a doorway. I asked for some water and cupped my hands to receive it. Water dripping down my elbows I looked at the old man. T h e goodly beard. T h e contentment that showed in his eyes. T h e cut up can of kerosene that lay prostrate before him. Bread arrived, unbidden, with an onion for a companion. I ate it up. up the haversack I was sitting on. I
I thought about it for a mile or two. But I knew already that it was time to turn around.
Dust in my beard, dust in my hair. T h e sun like a hammer on the head. An itching arse. A night spent on flagstones.
Apart f r o m the problem o f t h e copy-text, there were, in ' T h e Turnaround', passages
I f o u n d mystifying. T h e p o e m is a b o u t a
walking trip through western Maharashtra a n d Kolatkar gives t h e
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Death of n Poet
names of the towns he passes through: Kalyan, Nasik, Rotegaon, Kopargaon. Far from being a pleasant excursion-though it has its light moments--the trip turns out to be an ordeal. At Rote-
in 2002. When his condition deteriorated, his family shifted him
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83
to Pune, to the house ofhis younger brother, who was a doctor. He had already been in Pune ten days when I made the phone call and found rhat he was too weak to speak. When I persisted, a little
gaon, he says, he 'went on trial', but there is no mention in the poem of any crime or whether the 'dog [that] died in the temple/
excitedly I'm afraid, in asking him about 'The Turnaround', he
where [he] was trying to get some sleep' and the crime are con-
said it was 'an inner journey' and mumbled something about a
nected. By the time he reached Kopargaon, it had become phy-
'personal crisis'. He said he'd explain everything if I came to Pune.
sically unendurable for him to continue walking: 'My tinshod hegira/ was hotting up'. But what did 'tinshod hegira' mean? In
I took the next train. I reached Pune late in the evening of the 2 1" and made my way
fact, now that I was reading it with an editorial eye, I felt there was
to his brother's house in Bibwewadi. The house was in a side street,
an air of mystery hanging over not just certain passages but the
a duplex in a row of identical housds, each with a modest front yard
whole poem. '[Iln realism you are down to facts on which the
including a motor scooter or car, often both, parked in it. Kolat-
world is based: that sudden reality which smashes romanticism
kar was in an upstairs room and seemed to be asleep. T h e brother
into a pulp', Joyce told Arthur Power. As a poet of 'that sudden
who was a doctor was still at his clinic, but his two other brothers,
reality', as someone who revelled in the particular and was passio-
Sudhir and Makarand, were there, as was his wife Soonoo. 'His
nate about nouns, especially proper nouns, Kolatkar gives us all
mouth is constantly parched', Sudhir said, 'and that's affected
the facts about the trip including the year ('Kopargoan is a big
his speech. H e also cannot take in any food. But he feels a little
town./ That's where I read that Stalin was dead.'), but this only
better in the mornings. Maybe you should come back tomorrow
deepened the puzzle. T h e poem's dramatic opening line, 'Bombay
and put your questions to him.' Looking at Kolatkar, there wasn't
made me a beggar', leaves several questions unanswered. What
much hope of getting answers.
had made him leave the city and seek the open road? Did he have
When I returned in the morning, I found Kolatkar was awake
a destination in mind, or even an itinerary? Was he, as his route
and, judging by the faces of those around him, ready to receive
suggests, going to the pilgrimage town of Shirdi, which is just
visitors. I pulled up a chair close to his bed and we resumed the
fourteen kilometres from Kopargaon? In 1953, the year Stalin
phone conversation started three days ago. Speaking haltingly and
died, Kolatkar was 22 years old.
with difficulty, sometimes leaving his sentences unfinished, he
My last phone conversation with Kolatkar was early in the
said that 'The Renunciation of the Dog' and 'The Turnaround'
third week of September. By then he had stopped going to Cafk
had come out of the same experience. Though it seems from 'The
Military, an Irani restaurant in Meadows Street, where over cups
Turnaround' that he went on the walking trip alone, Kolatkar said
of tea he routinely met with a close circle of friends on Thursday
rhat a friend, the poet and painter Bandu Waze, had accompanied
afternoons, as he had earlier met them, for more than three de-
him. There is a reference to Waze, though not by name, in 'The
cades, at Wayside Inn in Kala Ghoda, before the place shut down
Renunciation of the Dog':
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Death of a Poet
Partial Recall
Tell me why the night before we started Dogs were vainly Barking a t the waves; And tell my why in an unknown temple Days and waves away A black dog dumbly From out of nowhere of ourselves yawned and leapt; And leaving us naked And shamefaced, Tell me why the black dog died Intrig~iinglybetween God and our heads.
85
arriving at their father's house in Pune, unshaven and tired, looking like two sadhus. When they sat down to a meal, he said, it was as though they had not eaten in days. Indeed, accounts of eating, or more often not eating, recur throughout 'The Turnaround':
I arrived in Nasik with peepul leaves between my teeth. 'The Renunciation of the Dog' does not mention the 'trial' in Rotegaon nor 'TheTurnaround' the dogs at the Gateway of India, but both poems refer to the incident at the temple. In 'The Renunciation ofthe Dog' the incident is central to the poem ('And
Kolatkar said that they spent the night before they started on the
tell me why in an unknown temple/. . . A black dog dumbly',
trip at the Gateway of India, which is where he heard the dogs
etc.), whereas in 'The Turnaround', as everything else in it, the
'vainly1 Barking at the waves'. They had probably slept rough on
incident, stripped down to essentials, like the language itself, is
the footpath. It would be, for them, the first of many such nights.
mentioned in passing.
We know little about Waze. H e and Kolatkar first met in 1952,
As Kolatkar now narrated it to me, there had been a series of
when Kolatkar was a student at the Sir J.J. School of Art. Dilip
petty thefts in Rotegaon and the suspicion of the townsfolk fell
Chitre, who was a close friend of both, describes Waze as 'a
on the two tramps. Hauled up before a group of elders (this is
maverick, self-taught artist . . . with immense energy, talent, and
the 'trial' referred to in 'The Turnaround'), they had a hard time
conviction that many of his academically cultivated colleagues
proving their innocence. When they were finally allowed to
lacked.' The 'academically cultivated colleagues' presumably
leave, it was on the condition that they first clean up the temple
referred to painters like Ambadas, Baburao Sadwelkar, and Tyeb
('drag the carcass away') where, on the one night they had spent
Mehta, who were students at the art school roughly at the same
in it, a 'black dog' had died 'Intriguingly between1 God and our
time as Kolatkar. In 1954, during the early difficult months of
heads.' Kolatkar said the dog had died at the midpoint between
their marriage, when Kolatkar and his first wife Darshan Chhabda
where they had lain down to sleep ('our heads') and the temple
were living in Malad, Bombay, in a place that was little better than
idol ('God').
a shack, Waze moved in with them. His presence, at a time when
I asked Kolatkar about 'tinshod hegira'. He said 'tinshod'
Kolatkar had no job and practically no money of his own, couldn't
referred to Nana Patil's patri sarkar or 'horseshoe government'.
have made matters easier.
Patil was a well-known revolutionary leader during colonial times
Makarand, whom I asked later about the walking trip, said he
and ran a parallel government in the villages around Satara in the
was then still at school but remembered Kolatkar and Waze
1940s. Those found de@ing its orders and collaborating with the
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Death ofa Poet
87
British had, horseshoe-fashion, tin nailed to the soles of their feet.
'The Renunciation of the Dog' is one of fourteen English
Kolatkar, in the poem, is comparing his suffering after his hegira-or flight--from Bombay ('It was walk walk walk and walk all the way') with the suffering of those punished by Patil's patri sarkar.
poems, collectively called 'journey poems', written during 1953-
4. Though they all came out of the same experience, the walking
His feet felt as though 'tinshod', 'The sun like a hammer on the
that identifies them with a particular landscape. It is as though, in
head'. He was by then at the end of his tether. The poem ends on a note that, in more senses than one, is visionary:
poetic resources to express it in. Never a man in a hurry, he was
trip through western Maharashtra, there is nothing in the poems 1953, Kolatkar had staked off his subject but not located the prepared to wait. The wait ended in 1967 when he wrote, in
I stopped to straighten my dhoti
Marathi, 'Mumbaina bhikes lavla'. Its English translation, 'The
that had bunched up in my crotch when sweat stung my eyes and I could see.
Turnaround', he did in 1987, to read at the Stockholm festival.
A clean swept yard. A hut. An old man. A young woman in a doorway.
Lying 'prostrate' before the old man was a 'cut up can ofkerosene'. Kolatkar now remembered that can. It was cut in half, he said, and looked as though the old man had 'beaten the life out of it'. As he spoke, he seemed to be reliving the satoric experience of fifty years ago:
Kolatkar showed the 'journey poems' to his friends, one of whom, Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, who later became a well-known art critic and writer on Marathi theatre, passed them on to Nissim Ezekiel. As editor of Quest, a new magazine funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Ezekiel was open to submissions. He also had an eye for talent and this time, in Kolatkar, he spotted a big one. He decided to carry 'The Renunciation of the Dog' in the magazine's inaugural issue, which appeared in August 1955. It was Kolatkar's first published poem in English. Around then, he and Ezekiel also met for the first time. For someone who was to spend his next fifty years in advertising, Kolatkar's meeting with
I thought about it for a mile or two. But I knew already that it was time to turn around.
Ezekiel, fittingly enough, took place in the offices of Shilpi, where Ezekiel had a job as copywriter. A line below 'The Hag' and 'Irani Restaurant Bombay' in Chitre's Anthology ofMarathi Poetry: 1945-65 (1967) says 'Eng-
About the 'personal crisis', though, which had led him to renounce the city he was returning to, he did not say anything.
lish version by the poet', suggesting that the two poems are translations. I knew from previous conversations with Kolatkar that
There remained the matter of 'daisies'. When I asked him about
he wrote them both in English and Marathi and considered them
it, he said I should change it to vishnukranta. He had looked it up
to be as much English poems as Marathi ones. Now, in Pune, as
in a book on flowers, he said, but to no avail. The book didn't give
Soonoo dabbed his lips with wet cotton wool to keep them moist,
the English name. (As I found out later, the English name for vishnukranta is speedwheel.)
he spoke about them again. The Marathi and English versions, he said, were 'very closely related'; 'they can bear close comparison'.
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Death of a Poet
He also said he wrote them 'side by side'. O f 'The Hag' and
Boatride, and if he said yes I'd put a tick against it. The ones I ticked
88
'Therdi' (its Marathi title) he said he would write one line in Marathi and a corresponding line in English, or the other way round. 'They run each other pretty close.' H e also commented on the rhyme scheme: 'There is no discrepancy.' Chitre, whom 1 8 rung up on reaching Pune, came with his wife Viju to see Kolatkar. He had with him an office file and a spiralbound book consisting of photocopies made on card paper. H e asked me to look at them. He had recently finished a short film on Kolatkar for the Sahitya Akademi, and the office file and the spiral-bound book, both of which Darshan had given him, were part of the archival material he'd collected. The poems in the file consisted mostly of juvenilia, and some, with their references to 'a begging bowl' and 'the changing landscape', looked like they belonged with the 'journey poems', which, as I found out later, they indeed did: Destined to become a begging bowl We let- rise our clay And holding it in our hand Wordlessly and worldlessly To be filled and fulfilled We wandered In the wilderness of our heart
and We retreated from ourselves To become the changing landscape And the mutable topography That accompanied us And whispered in our ears
I quickly went through the poems and read them out to Kolatkar. If l liked something I asked him if I could put it in The
89
were 'Of an origin moot as cancer's', 'Dual', 'In a godforsaken hotel', and 'my son is dead'. The poems were typewritten and some had obvious typos. A line in 'Dual' read 'the two might declare harch thorns and live'. 'Harch?' I asked Kolatkar. 'Harsh.' In the list I had sent him, the one he had approved of, the 'Poems in English' section had eight poems. Now it had twelve. Clearly, The Boatride was going to be a bigger book than I had anticipated; I also began to see why Kolatkar wanted it to have an editor. In 1966, Kolatkar joined an advertising studio, Design Unit, in which he was one of the partners. It did several successful campaigns, including one for Liberty shirts, which won the Communication Artists Guild award for best campaign of the year. The Liberty factory had recently been gutted in a fire and the copy said 'Burnt but not extinguished'; Kolatkar did the visuals, one of which showed a shirt, with flames leaping from it.The studio was in existence for three years and everything in the spiral-bound book was from this period of Kolatkar's life. In fact, it was his Design Unit engagement diary, whose pages Darshan had rearranged and interspersed with poems, drawings, and jottings. Flipping through it was like peeking into an artist's lumber-room, crammed with bric-a-brac. It revealed more about Kolatkar's public life as successful advertising professional and private life as poet than a chapter in a biography would have. T h e first page had a drawing of a gladiolus, the curved handle of an umbrella sticking out through the leaves. Other drawings showed an umbrella hanging from a sickle moon; from an antelope's horns; from a man's wrist; stuck in a vase; safely tucked behind a man's ear like the stub of a pencil; placed with a cup and
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Death of a Poet
saucer, like a spoon, to stir the tea with. The text accompanying the drawings was always the same, 'Keep it'. Between the drawings were jottings, scribbles, messages ('Darshan Kolatkar 40 Daulat Send me my green shirt'), expenditure figures ('Liquor 37.75'),
and 'a wicked gleam' in her eye. One imagines Kolatkar's face
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91
bore a similar expression when he mischievously transformed the humble invoice into a cheery greeting.
memos to himself ('plan & save cost; meetings fortnightly; how to
What can be more uninspiring, more ordinary, or, sometimes, more enchanting, than the tall stories men tell each other when
inspire1 educate artists'), names and telephone numbers of clients,
they meet in a restaurant over a cup of tea? In 'Three Cups ofTea'
appointments to keep or cancel, seemingly useless scraps ofpaper
Kolatkar reproduces verbatim, in 'street Hindi' (and translates
preserved only because those who were close to him were farsighted
into American English), three such stories, the third ofwhich goes
and valued every scrap he put pen to. O n e page had written in it 'Ring Farooki'; 'Ring Pfizer'; 'Ring Mrs Chat. cancel 3.30 Tues.
as follows:
appt.'; '?Bandbox?'; '7.30 Kanti Shah'; and somewhere in the
i went to burrna
middle was also the drawing of a man with a V-shaped face
where the film aag was running i went to see the film the guy behind the booking office window wants to see my passport i said all i wanna do is see a fucking film man i was arrested and sent back to manipur no passport the police commissioner asked why did you go to burma? prickface i said what's there in india?
and arrows for arms and legs, the right arrow-leg pointing to ' 12.00 Jamshed'. Against a drawing ofa cut-out-like figure he had written, 'Imagine he is the client you hate most and stick a pin anywhere.' And above it, 'Just had a frustrated meeting with a frustrated client. This fellow goes on and on. I do not like long telephonic conversations. The client is a Marwari, you know.' In an invoice to one Mrs Mukati dated '9/9/67', he had jokily scribbled '10,000' under 'Quantity' and 'Good mornings' under 'Please receive the following in good order and condition'. The scribble on the invoice, the drawings, and the poems, whether early or late, are part of the same vision. Enchanted by the ordinary, Kolatkar made the ordinary enchanting. Which is why, however familiar one may be with his work, it's always as though one is encountering it for the first time. '[Tlhe dirtier the better'
H e wrote the poem in 1960, at the beginning of the revolutionary
he says of the 'unwashed child' in a poem in Kala Ghoda, 'The
decade that we associate more with Andy Warhol's 1964 Brillo
Ogress', and the same might be said about the subjects he was
Box exhibition and the music of John Cage than with Kolatkar's
drawn to: the humbler the better. When the ogress, as Kolatkar
poem; more with New York than Bombay. Yet the impulse behind
calls her, gives the 'tough customer on her hands', 'a furious,
their works is the same, to erase the boundaries between art and
foaming boy', a good scrub, she has a 'wispy half-smile' on her face
ordinary speech, or art and cardboard boxes, or art and fart, whose
92
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sound Cage incorporated into his music. The impulse has its origin in Marcel Duchamp's famous 'ready-mades', the snow shovels, bicycle wheels, bottle racks, and urinals he picked off the
Death of a Poet the burnt matchstick with the tea circle makes a rude compass, the heretic needle jabs a black star. tables chairs mirrors are night that needs to be sewed and cashier is where at seams it comes apart.
peg. It was art by invoice. By reproducing conversations heard in a restaurant in 'Three Cups ofTea', Kolatkar introduced the Bombay urban vernacular, the language of the bazaar, to Indian poetry; in 'Irani Restaurant Bombay', he introduces seedy restaurant interiors and the bazaar
wouldn't have read Walter Benjamin's essays, which were not then
art on their walls.
someone who daily trudged the city's footpaths, particularly the
In 1962, when he wrote 'Irani Restaurant Bombay', Kolatkar available to the Anglophone world, nor would he have heard ofthe arcade-haunting Parisian flaneur. But as a Bombay loafer himself, area of Kala Ghoda, he would have recognized the figure.
the cockeyed shah of iran watches the cake decompose carefully in a cracked showcase; distracted only by a fly on the make as it finds in a loafer's wrist an operational base. dogmatically green and elaborate trees defeat breeze; the crooked swan begs pardon if it disturb the pond; the road, neat as a needle, points at a lovely cottage with a garden. the thirsty loafer sees the stylised perfection of the landscape, in a glass ofwater, wobble. a sticky tea print for his scholarly attention singles out a verse from the blank testament of the table.
'Salo loafer!' says a character *in Cyrus Mistry's play Doongaji House. Over the centuries, 'loafer' has become almost an Indian word of abuse, suggesting a good-for-nothing who drifts through the city in self-absorbed fashion when, in fact, he is streetwise and his keen eye doesn't miss a thing. (Kolatkar himselfseldom walked past a pavement bookstall without picking up a treasure.) This is true of the loafer even when he appears most relaxed, having tea, say, in an Irani restaurant, a portrait of'the cockeyed shah of iran' displayed above the till and the whole place buzzing with flies. O n these occasions, he is like a papyrologist in a library poring over a classical document, though the objects he could be studying are the tables, chairs, mirrors, and bazaar prints in whose midst he sits. T h e bazaar print here described-the
an instant of mirrors turns the tables on space. while promoting darkness below the chair, the car in its rwo timing sleep dreams evenly and knows dreaming to be an administrative problem. his cigarette
the landscape-brings
'stylized perfection' of
to mind some of Bhupen Khakhar's yet un-
painted early works like ResidencyBungalow (1 969). In Khakhar's painting, the bungalow is a two-storey colonial house, complete with verandah, Doric columns, and pediment; 'a lovely cottage'.
lit, the loafer. affecting the exactitude of a pedagogue, places the burnt matchstick in the tea circle; and sees i t rise: as when to identify a corpse one visits a morgue and politely the corpse rises from a block of ice.
, as a needle', with 'elaborate trees' on Leading to it is a ~ a t h'neat either side. In the background are more trees, painted in the same 'elaborate' fashion. In the foreground, where the 'crooked swan' might have been, is the ~ainter'sfriend, Gulammohammed Sheikh,
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Death of a Poet'
sitting very stiffly in a chair, leaning a little to his right, his arm resting on a round table. Behind him, sitting on a platform attached to the house, are smaller figures. Pop art was an influence on Khakhar, and it is not surprising that both he and Kolatkar responded to bazaar prints. They were, in their different mediums, responding to the spirit of the age. Residency Bungalow was the house in Baroda that Khakhar and Sheikh shared, along with other painter friends of theirs. And it was from this house, which belonged to Baroda University where Sheikh taught at the art school, that Sheikh and Khakhar brought out their A4-sized little magazine Vrischik (1969-73), which means scorpion in Gujarati. Among those whose work appeared in its pages was Kolatkar, who contributed translations of Namdeo, Janabai, and Muktabai to a special issue of Vrirchik (September-October 1970) on bhakti poetry. As Ezra Pound (from St Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, D C ) wrote to Chak ('Dear Chak'), that is Arniya Chakravarty "'All flows" and the pattern is intricate.' The view from a restaurant rather than a restaurant interior is the subject of Kala Ghoda Poems. O n most days, around breakfast time and again in the late afternoon, after the lunch crowd had left, Kolatkar could be found at Wayside Inn in Rampart Row. H e would usually be alone, except on Thursday afternoons, when all those who wished to see him joined his table and there could be as many as fifteen people around it. Sometime in the early 1980s, the idea of writing a sequence of poems on the street life of Kala Ghoda, encompassing its varied population (the lavatory attendant, the municipal sweeper, the kerosene vendor, the beggar-cum-tambourine player, the drug pusher, the shoeshine, the 'ogress' who bathes the baby boy, the idli lady, the rat-poison man, the cellist, the lawyer), its animals (pi-dog, crow), its statuary
(David Sassoon),its commercial establishments (Lund & Blockley),
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and its buildings (St Andrew's Church, Max Miiller Bhavan, Prince of Wales Museum, Jehangir Art Gallery), began to take shape in his head. Asked in 1997 by Eunice de Souza, in one of the few interviews he gave, how he managed to write a poem like 'The Ogress1,in which both the woman and the boy she's bathing 'emerge as complete human beings', Kolatkar replied, 'It's a secret'. The secret, I think, lay in the gift he had of making completely impersonal the scene he was imaginatively engaging with, while at the same time eschewing all isms and ideologies, identifying closely with each part. By the time he finished the sequence in 2004, to quote Joyce's famous remark to Frank Budgen about Ulyrres, it gave a picture of Kala Ghoda 'so complete that if it one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of [his] book.' The first time I heard Kolatkar read was at Jehangir Art Gallery in 1967. Two years earlier, at Gallery Chemould in the same premises, Khakhar had exhibited his first collages, their inspiration the vividly coloured oleographs that had fascinated him since boyhood. I cannot now recall what the occasion was, nor, apart from the painter Jatin Das, who else read that evening, but Kolatkar read a poem that he seemed to have improvised on the spot. It began 'My name is Arun Kolatkar' and was over in less than a minute. He left immediately afterwards, making his way to one of the Colaba bars, for he was, in the late 1960s, for about two and a half ears, a heavy drinker, stories of which are still told by those who knew him at the time. To my surprise, the poem was in the Design Unit diary, written out in his neat hand. H e said I could include it in The Boatride, then added, referring to the poem, 'It's a disappearing trick.' There were also other poems in the diary which I thought were worthy of inclusion: 'Directions',
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a 'foundypoem similar to 'Three Cups ofTea' but in a quite different linguistic register, was one and 'today i feel i do not belong', which makes the only reference to advertising in his poetry ('i'm god's gift to advertisinglis the refrain of my song'), another. For the most part, though, the diary consisted of ideas for future poems ('Write a bloody poem called beer. Make it bloody.'), notes and fragments in English and Marathi, and quick verbal sketches that captured a domestic moment or something he'd seen while walking idly down a road. For Kolatkar, writing was a zero waste game; no thought that passed through his mind went unnoted.
on the same tile of the footpath where that schoolgirl is standing a mad woman sat yesterday scratching with her nail a rotten cunt and a big festering wound on her shaven head
leave. As we slipped out of the room, a message came from the kitchen downstairs that lunch was ready. The following day, on my way to see him, I wondered ifwe had not already had our last conversation. Still, in the hope that he might be able to talk, I was carrying with me the original list of thirty-two poems for The Boatride, since added to, as well as the diary. But Kolatkar had other things on his mind. H e spoke about American popular music and its influence on him. He said that gangster films, cartoon strips, and blues had shaped his sense of the English language and he felt closer to the American idiom, particularly Black American speech, than to British English. H e mentioned Bessie Smith, Big Bill Broonzy, and Muddy Waters-'Their names are like poems', he said-and quoted the harmonica player Blind Sonny Terry's remark, 'A harmonica player must know how to do a good fox chase.' One reason why he liked blues, he said, was that the musicians were often untrained and improvised as they went along. He dwelt on the music's social history: how during the Depression blues performers moved from place to place, playing in honky-tonks, sometimes under the protection of mobsters. He remembered the Elton John song 'Don't shoot me I'm only the piano player'. Blues (though it can have a spiritual side) and bhakti poetry are, in intent, markedly different from each other. O n e belongs to
Leap clear, my lion, through the ring of fire. Mind the mane, the hind legs and the tail. Do it again.
the secular world; the other addresses itself to god. There are, however, parallels between them. Each draws its images from a common pool, each limits itself to a small number of themes that it keeps returning to, and each speaks in the idiom of the street. They can sound remarkably alike.
Once we got the rat behind the trunk, all we had to do was ram it against the wall.
your sulky lips are prawns fork them with a shining smile
I wanted to ask Kolatkar about these poems and fragments but his voice had grown faint and he closed his eyes. It was time to
It's a long old road, but I'm gonna find the end. It's a long old road, but I'm gonna find the end. And when I get there I'm gonna shake hands with a friend.
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99
could be Tukaram but is Bessie Smith, just as 'Get lost, brother,
After Elton John's 'Don't shoot me', Kolatkar recalled some
if you don't1 Fancy our kind of living' could be blues but are the
more songs: Big Mama Thornton's 'Hound Dog' and Elvis
lines of a Tukaram song, in Kolatkar's 'blues' translation. In his
Presley's 'Blue Suede Shoes' and 'Money Honey'. His voice, which so far had been a whisper, suddenly grew loud as he almost sang
use of diction, Kolatkar saw himself very much in the bluesbhakti tradition. He once said to me that he wrote a Marathi that any Marathi speaker could follow. H e also said that he was not finished with a translation until he had made it look like a poem by Arun Kolatkar. The parallels between Kolatkar's work and blues do not end there. Here is the blues singer Tommy McClennan, standing beside a road in the Mississippi delta, waiting for a bus in the hot sun:
out the words: You ain't nothin' but a hound dog cryin' all the time. You ain't nothin' but a hound dog cryin' all the time. Well, you ain't never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine.
and Well, you can knock me down, Step in my face. . .
Here comes that Greyhound with his tongue hanging out on the side. Here comes that Greyhound with his tongue hanging out on the side. You have to buy a ticket if you want to ride.
And here is Kolatkar in jejuri: The bus goes round in a circle. Stops inside the bus station and stands purring softly in front of the priest. A catgrin on his face and a live, ready to eat held between its teeth. ('The Priest')
Observe, too, the stanza unit. It was with the development of the three-line verse, which Kolatkar uses here and throughout much of Kala Ghoda Poems, that the blues became a distinctive poetic form.
Do anything that you want to do, but uh-uh, Honey, lay off of my shoes Don't you step on my blue suede shoes.
and You know, the landlord rang my front door bell. I let it ring for a long, long spell. I went to the window, I peeped through the blind, And asked him to tell me what's on his mind. He said, Money, honey. Money, honey. Money, honey, if you want to get along with me.
H e said he had a record collection of about 75 LPs, which he gifted to the National Centre for the Performing Arts. He would have gifted them, in all likelihood, in 198 1, when he moved house from Bakhtavar in Colaba, where he had lived since 1970, to a
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much smaller one-room apartment in Prabhadevi, Dadar. Around then, he also sold off his substantial collection of music and science fiction books. The first time I visited him in Prabhadevi, 1 was surprised that there were hardly any books in the room. I especially missed the volumes of American and European poets, which he kept in a glass-fronted bookcase in Bakhtavar and which I would eye enviously each time I passed them. Those, he said, he had not sold off but because ofthe shortage ofspace had put them in storage with a friend. I remember asking if he regretted not having his books with him and he said that having them in his head was more important than their physical presence. This particular conversation with him came back to me recently while reading Susan Sontag's essay on Canetti, 'Mind as Passion'. To interpolate from it, Kolatkar's passion for books was not, as it was for Walter Benjamin, 'a passion for books as material objects (rare books, first editions).' Rather, the 'ideal' was 'to put the books inside one's head; the real library is only a mnemonic system.' To this library in the head, because of his prodigious memory, Kolatkar, at all times, had complete access. I never saw him reach out for a book, but whenever he spoke about one, whether it was a Latin American novel, The Tale of the Genji, or a Sanskrit bhand, it was as though he had it open in front of him, and if he remembered a funny passage would, while narrating it, almost roll on the floor, gently slapping his thighs. Kolatkar may not have had space for books, but he continued to buy them as before, on ascale that would match the acquisitions ofa small city library. (He purchased newspapers on the same scale too; five morning and three evening papers every day.) He bought books, read them, and passed them on to his friends. This is how I acquired my copy of Mrquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, which he had bought in hardback as soon as it became available at Strand Book Stall.
It was only a matter of time before books reappeared in his apartment, covering a wall from end to end. Scanning the titles, I found no poetry or fiction; instead, history. When, in her interview with him, Eunice de Souza remarked on the books on Bosnia on his shelves, Kolatkar dwelt at length on his reading habits:
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I want to reclaim everything I consider my tradition. I am particularly interested in history of all kinds, the beginning of man, archaeology, histories of everything from religion to objects, bread-making, paper, clothes, people, the evolution of man's knowledge of things, ideas about the world or his own body. T h e history of man's trying to make sense of the universe and his place in it may take me to Sumerian writing. It's a browser's approach, not a scholarly one; it's one big supermarket situation. I read across disciplines and don't necessarily read a book from beginning to end. I jump back and forth from one subject to another. I find reading documents as interesting as reading poetry. I am interested in the natureofhistory, which I find ambiguous. What is history? While reading it one doesn't know. It's a floating situation, a nagging quest. It's difficult to arrive at any certainties. What you get are versions of history, with nothing final about them. Some parts are better lit than others, or the light may change, or one may see the object differently. I also like looking at legal, medical, and non-sacred texts-schoolboys' texts from Egypt, a list of household objects in Oxyrhincus, a list of books in the collection of a Peshwa wife, correspondence about obtaining a pair of spectacles, deeds of sale, marriage and divorce contracts. O n e dimension ofmy interest in all this is literary, for example, in the Bible as literature. T h e Song of Solomon goes back to Egypt and Assyria. I like following these trails.
Like all autodidacts, Kolatkar's dream was to know ('to reclaim') everything, to hold all knowledge, like a shining sphere, in the palm of the hand. Nor did he give up reading fiction altogether. O n e winter I was in Bombay he was reading W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz.
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103
He readwidely, and ifa question interested him, he would track
Gananath Obeyesekere's The Cult of the Goddess Pattini; for
down everything there was on it. When he was contemplating a poem on Heloise for Bhijki k h i (2003), each of whose twentyfive poems is centred around a sorrowing woman-from Isis, Cassandra, and the Virgin Mary to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Susan Sontag, and his own sister, Rajani, who lost her only son, a cadet pilot in the Indian Air Force, in an air crash-he collected a shelf-
'Nadezhda', her two volumes of autobiography and Mandelstam's prose; and for 'Susan', Susan Sontag's O n Photography. 'Hadamma' was based on an Inuit folktale and 'Maimun', the Qureshi girl from Haryana who was the victim of an honour killing in 1997, on a clutch of newspaper reports. The story was still being reported in the Indian press when Kolatkar wrote the poem. In
full of books on the subject. Eventually he abandoned the idea of
'Ashru' (Tears), the first poem in the book, he uses the word
writing on Heloise, saying to me that he had not been able to find a way into the story, by which he meant a new perspective on it
he came across in a newspaper article on the work of the molecu-
that would make it different from a retelling. He faced a similar problem with Hypatia ofAlexandria, which he solved by making St Cyril, who is thought to have had a hand in her murder, the poem's speaker. At 393 pages, Bhijki k h i (which translates as Tear-stained Notebook) is among all of Kolatkar's works the longest. It is also the most complex. Just to enumerate the books and authors he read for it is to outline a course in world literature. For 'Trimary' (Three Maries), the New Testament; for 'Laila', Fuzuli's Leyla
'lysozyme', an enzyme found in human tears and egg white, which lar biologist Francis Crick, and 'Kim' is a reference to Nick Ut's famous 1972 photograph showing nine-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing her village outside Saigon after a napalm attack. H e does not provide the poems with notes, but had he done so the eclecticism of his sources would be reminiscent of Marianne Moore.
Bhijki k h i won the Sahitya Akademi Award in Marathi but otherwise the critics, daunted by its range of references, greeted it with silence. Kolatkar, unfortunately, never got round to translating
andMejnun in Sofi Huri's translation (Kolatkar said he found the
its poems into English. 'Sarpa Satra', the penultimate poem in the book, appears to be an exception but it is not. I asked him about
introductory essay by Alessio Bombaci on the history of the poem
it now and he said that he started writing it in Marathi first but,
particularly useful); for 'Apala', the Rg Veda, Rg Edit Darshan, and Chitrao Shastri's Prachin Charitra Kosh; for 'Isis', E.A. Wallis
compelled by the subject, also decided to write it in English. Like 'The Hag' and 'Irani Restaurant Bombay', it exists independent-
Budge; for 'Cassandra', Homer, Virgil, Robert Graves, and Robert
ly in both languages.
Payne (The Gold of Troy); for 'Muktayakka', the Sunyasampa-
Based in the frame story of the Mahabharata, Sarpa Satra is
dane; for 'Rabi'a', Farid-ud-Din Attar and Margaret Smith; for
also a contemporary tale of revenge and retribution, mass murder
'Hypatia', Edmund Gibbon, Charles Kingsley, E.M. Forster, and Maria Dzielska; for 'Po Chu-i', Arthur Waley; for 'Helenche
and genocide, and one ~erson'sattempt to break the cycle. In the story, the divine hero Arjuna decides, 'Just for kicks, maybe', to
guntaval' (Helen's Hair), Robert Payne and Peter Green (Alexander
burn down the Khandava forest. In a passage of great lyrical
to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age); for 'Kannagi', Alain Danielou's translation of Shilappadikaram and
beauty, Kolatkar describes the conflagation in which everything gets destroyed, 'elephants, gazelles, antelopes' and
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Death ofa Poet
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103
He read widely, and ifa question interested him, he would track
Gananath Obeyesekere's The Cult of the Goddess Pattini; for
down everything there was on it. When he was contemplating a poem on Heloise for Bhijki Vahi (2003), each of whose twentyfive poems is centred around a sorrowing woman-from Isis,
prose; and for 'Susan', Susan Sontag's On Photography. 'Hadamma'
Cassandra, and the Virgin Mary to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Susan Sontag, and his own sister, Rajani, who lost her only son, a cadet pilot in the Indian Air Force, in an air crash-he collected a shelffull of books on the subject. Eventually he abandoned the idea of
'Nadezhda', her two volumes of autobiography and Mandelstam's was based on an Inuit folktale and 'Maimun', the Qureshi girl from Haryana who was the victim of an honour killing in 1997, on a clutch of newspaper reports. The story was still being reported in the Indian press when Kolatkar wrote the poem. In 'Ashru' (Tears), the first poem in the book, he uses the word
writing on Heloise, saying to me that he had not been able to find
'lysozyme', an enzyme found in human tears and egg white, which
a way into the story, by which he meant a new perspective on it
he came across in a newspaper article on the work of the molecu-
that would make it different from a retelling. He faced a similar
lar biologist Francis Crick, and 'Kim' is a reference to Nick Ut's
problem with Hypatia ofAlexandria, which he solved by making St Cyril, who is thought to have had a hand in her murder, the
famous 1972 photograph showing nine-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing her village outside Saigon after a napalm attack. H e does not provide the poems with notes, but had he done so the eclecticism
poem's speaker. At 393 pages, Bhijki Vahi (which translates as Tear-stained
of his sources would be reminiscent of Marianne Moore.
Notebook) is among all of Kolatkar's works the longest. It is also the most complex. Just to enumerate the books and authors he
Bhijki Vahi won the Sahitya Akademi Award in Marathi but otherwise the critics, daunted by its range of references, greeted it
read for it is to outline a course in world literature. For 'Trimary' (Three Maries), the New Testament; for 'Laila', Fuzuli's Leyla andMejnun in Sofi Huri's translation (Kolatkar said he found the
with silence. Kolatkar, unfortunately, never got round to translating its poems into English. 'Sarpa Satra', the penultimate poem in the
introductory essay by Alessio Bombaci on the historj~ofthe poem
book, appears to be an exception but it is not. I asked him about it now and he said that he started writing it in Marathi first but,
particularly useful); for 'Apala', the Rg Veda, Rg Vedic Darshan,
compelled by the subject, also decided to write it in English. Like
and Chitrao Shastri's Prachin Charitra Kosh; for 'Isis', E.A. Wallis
'The Hag' and 'Irani Restaurant Bombay', it exists independent-
Budge; for 'Cassandra', Homer, Virgil, Robert Graves, and Robert
ly in both languages.
Payne (The Gold of Troy); for 'Muktayakka', the Sunyasampa-
Based in the frame story of the Mahabharata, Sarpa Satra is
dane; for 'Rabi'a', Farid-ud-Din Attar and Margaret Smith; for
also a contemporary tale of revenge and retribution, mass murder
'Hypatia', Edmund Gibbon, Charles Kingsley, E.M. Forster, and
and genocide, and one ~erson'sattempt to break the cycle. In the
Maria Dzielska; for 'Po Chu-i', Arthur Waley; for 'Helenche
story, the divine hero Arjuna decides, 'Just for kicks, maybe', to
guntaval' (Helen's Hair), Robert Payne and I'eter Green (Alexander
burn down the Khandava forest. In a passage of great lyrical
to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age); for
beauty, Kolatkar describes the conflagation in which everything gets destroyed, 'elephants, gazelles, antelopes' and
'Kannagi', Alain Danielou's translation of Shilappadikaram and
Partial Recall people as well. Simple folk, children of the forest who had lived there happily for generations, since time began. They've gone without a trace. With their language that sounded like the burbling of a brook, their songs that sounded like the twittering of birds, and the secrets of their shamans who could cure any sickness by casting spells with their special flutes made from the hollow wingbones of red-crested cranes. Among those who die in the 'holocaust' is a snake-woman, to avenge whose loss her husband, Takshaka, kills A r j ~ 's grandson, Parikshit. Parikshit's son, Janamejaya, then holds the b.Ldsesacrifice, the Sarpa Satra, to rid the world of snakes: 'My vengeance will be swift and terrible./ I will not rest1 until I've exterminated them all.' Though the mass killing of snakes symbolically represents the many genocides of the last century, Kolatkar, by taking a story from an ancient epic, brings the whole of human history under the scrutiny of his moral vision. In the Mahabharata, Aastika, whose mother is herself a snake-woman and Takshaka's sister, is able to stop the sacrifice midway, but Kolatkar's poem offers no such consolation: When these things come to an end, people find other subjects to talk about
Death of a Poet than just - the latest episode of the Mahabharata and the daily statistics of death; rediscover simpler pleasuresfly kites, collect wild flowers, make love. Life seems to return to normal. But do not be deceived. Though, sooner or later, these celebrations of hatred too come to an end like everything else, the fire-the fire lit for the purposecan never be put out. His Bombay friends had meanwhile been arriving through the morning to see Kolatkar. It was aThursday, and the crowd around his bed-Adil Jussawalla, Ashok Shahane, Raghoo Dandavate, Kiran Nagarkar, Ratnakar Sohoni-was a little like the Thursday afternoon crowd around his table at Wayside Inn. Also in the room were Dilip and Viju Chitre. Sohoni was Kolatkar's Prabhadevi neighbour and had known him since his Design Unit days. H e was carrying an accordion file, bulging with papers, which he handed over to me. Separately, he also gave me a letter. It was from Edwin Frank, the editor of New York Review Books Classics. Frank had been in touch with Kolatkar overjduri, which he acquired for the series in May 2004. When Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpn Satra appeared, Kolatkar had sent him the books and Frank's letter was an acknowledgement. I read it out.
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interest in blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll took a new turn. He learnt musical notation and took lessons in the guitar and, from Arjun Shejwal, the pakhawaj, and started to write songs, recording, in
September 3, 2004 Dear Mr. Kolatkar, Many thanks for sending me Sarpa Satra and the long awaited Kala Ghoda poems. I have read both books with enormous pleasure and look forward to doing so again many times. The acuteness ofdescription, the attentive humanity, and the humour are all extraordinary; above all, I am struck by how the poems, as true poems will, succeed in making time-a time in which the world becomes real and welcome and which they offer to the reader as a gift. Here's to idlis! I also want to say how beautifully put together the two books are. And many thanks for the signedcopy ofjejuriwhich Amit Chaudhuri has forwarded to me. I cannot read Marathi, I am sad to say, but are there any English translations of any of the poems you have written in that language? Pras Prakashan's brief description makes me eager to find out what I can. Where, finally, should I turn to purchase additional copies of the two new books? With deepest appreciation and admiration, Yours, Edwin Frank
1973, a demo consisting of 'Poor Man', 'Nobody', 'Joe and Bongo Bongo', and 'Radio Message from a Quake Hit Town'. Three of these are 'found' songs, further examples of Kolatkar's transformations of the commonplace. 'Joe and Bongo Bongo' and 'Radio Message from a Quake Hit Town' were based on newspaper reports and 'Poor Man' took its inspiration from the piece ofpaper that beggars thrust before passengers waiting in bus queues and at railway stations. It gives the beggar's life story and ends with an appeal for money. 'Poor Man' has an ananda-lahari in the background, an instrument that is popular with both beggars and mendicants, particularly the Baul singers of Bengal. While its plangent music is truthful to the origin of the song, the beggar's appeal, it also provides a nice contrast to the outrageous lyrics in which the 'poor man from apoor land' is an aspiring rock star, who is singing not for his next meal but because he wants 'a villa in the
~ 1
I had visited Kolatkar in July, when Kala Ghoda Poems and
I
would try and visit him again in August. I couldn't go, but in anticipation of my coming he had set aside the poems which he wanted me to see, putting them in the accordion file. The first folder I pulled out from it was marked 'Drunk & other songs. Late sixties, early seventies'. This was the period when Kolatkar's
and music companies there in the demo but nothing came of the and he abandoned all future musical plans. He filed away the
'September 3. It's the date on the letter', I said.
Sarpa Satra were released, and had told him before leaving that I
south of france' and 'a gold disk on [his] wall'. In October 1973 one of Kolatkar's friends, Avinash Gupte, who was travelling to London and New York, tried to interest agents effort. Kolatkar's shot at the 'gold disk' had ended in disappointment
'Nice letter', Kolatkar said after I finished reading it. And after a pause, 'What did you say about September?'
107
'Drunk & other songs', never to return to them again. Instead, in November-December of that year, he sat down and wrote/iuri, completing it in a few weeks. One by one, I read out the 'Drunk & other songs', many of which I was seeing for the first time. I wanted to know which ones to include in The Boatride and, in case there was more than one version, which version to use. I read them in the order I found them.
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Death of a Poet
tape me drunk my sister my chipmunk
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'Drunk', he said, by way of categorizing the song. During his drinking days, Kolatkarhad had his run-ins with the police, being picked up for disorderly behaviour o n at least one occasion. Years later, h e recalled the jail experience in Kala Ghoda Poems:
spittle spittle spittle gather my spittle but never in a hospital
Nearer home, in Bombay itself, the miserable bunch of drunks, delinquents, smalltime crooks
don't tie me down promise me pet don't tie me down to a hospital bed my salvation i believe is in a basket of broken eggs yolk on my sleeve and vomit on my legs
and the usual suspects have already been served their morning kanji in Byculla jail.
.
They've been herded together now and subjected to an hour of force-fed education.
o world what is my worth o streets
('Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda') But the poems I was reading to h i m from the folder were nearer
where is my shirt
in time to the experience they described: nothing's wrong with me man i'm ok it's just that i haven't had a drink all day
begone my psychiatrist boo but before you do lend me your trousers because in mine i've ~issed
let me finish my first glass of beer and this shakiness will disappear you'll have to light my cigarette i can't strike a match but see the difference once the first drink's down the hatch
'That sounds honourable enough', Kolatkar joked after I'd finished reading it. I read o u t the next one:
'Straight drunk', came his response, quicltly. To other songs, after hi constable tell me what's your collar size same as mine i bet this shirt will fit you right
hearing the first line, he said I could decide later whether to
the shirt is yours feel it don't you like the fall all you got to do to get it is make one phone call . . .
Barring two, I have included all the songs in the folder. They
include them or not a n d to those towards the end h e said 'Skip'.
I
appear in a separate section, 'Words for Music'.
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A second folder contained his translations from Marathi, six of which I had not seen before, 'Malkhamb', 'Buildings', and the four 'Hospital Poems'. In a note given on the same sheet as the poem, Kolatkar says that 'malkhamb' 'means, literally, "a wrestler's pole". 1 t ' ~a smooth, wooden, vertical pole buried in the g o u n d . A common feature found in all Indian gyms. Used by wrestlers in training and by gymnasts to display their skill.' Remembering his boyhood in Kolhapur, Kolatkar said that he used to be quite good at the malkhamb. T h e 'Hospital Poems' were not a typescript but a photocopy from a magazine and I asked him where they'd been published. H e said 'Santan'. I wondered what he meant and Adil helped me out. H e said that the poems had appeared in Santan Rodriguez's magazine Kavi, which had brought out a special Kolatkar number in 1978. Referring to 'The Turnaround', Kolatkar said that the book in which he'd looked for the English equivalent of vishnukranta was in the accordion file. 'It has a description of the flower', he said. I hadn't had a chance to explore the file but did so now and found Flowers of the Sahayadri (2001) by Shrikant Ingalhalikar in one of the pockets. 'Your work is in good hands', Adil said to Kolatkar, and repeated the sentence. H e believes he saw Kolatkar smile. Sohoni, at Kolatkar's behest, had done some photography for the cover of The Boatride and he showed him the pictures. They were shots of boats at the Gateway of India: where the sea jostles against the wall vacuous sailboats snuggle tall and gawky
their masts at variance islam mary dolphin their names appearing music ('the boat ride') Kolatkar looked at the photographs but didn't say anything. Then Ashok Shahane asked him something to which he replied that they could discuss it once he aeturned to Bombay. It was the last thing he said this side of silence. H e died two days later, around midnight.
of toys from previous Diwali melas. Seen together, the toys make a city of clay, a clay city that is overcrowded and bursting at the seams. Here you will find a motor car, colourfully painted; a pair of street lights, one with its light smashed; four loudspeakers fixed on a pole; a vase with two green leaves and two pink flowers; a battle tank in camouflage colours and a piece of stiff wire for cannon; a woman carrying two pots, one on her head and the
City of Clay H e has a handlebar moustache, side-parted hair, and is dressed in a shiny black suit. She wears a pleated pink skirt with matching
other tucked under her arm; a coiled snake whose springy hood goes back and forth when tapped; a cock with a red cockscomb; a blue-winged fairy with a parrot sitting on her shoulder; a schoolboy, neatly dressed; a caparisoned horse; an old man with white
blouse. They have red tikas on their foreheads and look newly
cotton wool stuck on his chin; a traffic policeman, the position of
married. From their features, they look Bengali. Standing against a Honda motorcycle, they are staring at me when it ought to be
his arms making him look like a Bharatanatyam dancer; a tiger on the prowl; a tiger resting, as though after a meal; a six-member
the other way round. I should be staring at them, which I am,
brass band in green uniform; and a prison which I was told is Naini
because his left hand is nowhere near where you expect it to be
Tail. But as in a real city, there is room on the trunk, despite the
but cupping her right breast. This is Diwali time. With crowds of shoppers at every stall, it is not easy to catch the toy-seller's eye. When at last I do, I point
overcrowding, for one more family. With a little shifting around, between the cock with the red cockscomb and the fairy with blue wings, I accommodate the motorcycle couple.
out the motorcycle couple and ask the price. Twelve rupees, he says, then goes back to attend to the other customers, one ofwhom is bargaining for a clay weightlifter and the other for clay images
Allahabad Live Ever since I was 17 years old, I've harboured the illusion that I do
of Ganesh and Lakshmi. It's a while before I'm able to catch his eye again and pay for the toy, which his wife hands over to me,
not live in Uttar I'radesh but New York, and to keep the illusion
wrapped in a piece of newspaper.
from shattering, instead of the local rag, I've always subscribed to
T h e trunk in the living room, its tin painted brown to make it
a Delhi paper. Delivered a day late and useless as news, I read it to
look1ikewood, is stuffed with quilts, blankets, woollens, mosquito nets, and armv surplus kitbags. Going by the stencilled markings
keep myself abreast of cultural events in the nation's capital, like
on them, some of the bags are of World War I1 vintage; some of the woollens, like my grandfather's achkan, go back to the Great War. Kept on the trunk, in no particular order, is an assortment
the film show at the Hungarian Centre or the exhibition at Art Heritage. But two years ago, after avisit to my GP, all this changed. The G P fancies himself as a wildlife photographer, and whenever I've gone to him he's given me the impression that he'd rather
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Partial Recall
talk about the elephant or antelope herd he's put up on the clinic wall than about any ailment I might have. O n this occasion though, seeing me come in, even before I could sit down on the revolving stool next to his revolving chair and fake my interest in his expensive hobby, he threw up his hands and gave me the news that Allahabad was in the grip ofa JE epidemic. The nursing home he was attached to was full up, he said, and he had been advising his patients who needed hc-spitalization to go to the district hospital or the medical college. Many of the patients were from Rajapur, an area close to where I live. 'JE?' I asked. 'Japanese encephalitis. It's the only story in the papers these days. Don't you read them?' The charade of living not in Allahabad but New York (or even Delhi), I realized, had to end, and it had to endvery soon if I didn't want it to cost me my life. The next day I changed my paper; I started t o read Allababad Live. Along with reports of murders, dacoities, and the latest epidemic, Allahabad Live gives you the reminiscences of distinguished local octogenarians ('When Indira Gandhi chastised a Congress leader') and on page 3, under 'Around Town', information on birthday celebrations ('Habib Tanvir's birthday celebrated'), yoga camps ('Yoga training camp organized'), probes ('CM urged to order probe'), meets ('Women astrologers meet today'), and melas ('Dadhikando mela'). 1 did not need 'Around Town' to tell me about Dadhikando. Year after year, the mela was brought live to me at night, when hundreds of loudspeakers played Bollywood music at full blast. The music would pound the air, as though the air were the coast and the music the sea at high tide. The relentless pounding, against which one was powerless in the same way that one is
powerless against the sea, would catch me unawares. Rudely shaken out of sleep, I would stay awake until daybreak, pacing the small bedroom as though I were an animal in a cage, all the while composing in my head a lengthy petition to the senior superintendent of police, with a copy marked to the President of India, complaining about the loudspeaker menace. But not any more, not since I changed my newspaper and started to get, through the local rag, advance news of the annual musical onslaught. With a supply of sleeping pills and cotton wool by my side, I was now ready to take on the mela, just as I was the no less fatal JE epidemic. Muir Road is a long straight road, one stretch of which passes through Rajapur, where the mela is held. Rajapur used to be a working-class area, supplying the neighbourhood with domestics, carpenters, plumbers, masons, house painters, and electricians, and most of it still is. To its south are narrow lanes, paved with brick. They branch off the main road and end in the kacbchar, rich alluvial land bordering the Ganges where watermelons are grown in summer. To its north is Rajapur Cemetery, which has existed since colonial times. There isn't a single 'wine shop' in Rajapur, but right by the popular Hanuman temple, the dado of whose interior wall is faced with white bathroom tiles, the old country liquor bar still flourishes. It was getting towards noon and too hot to walk. Arriving there on my bicycle, I saw on either side ofthe road, at a distance ofevery few metres, wooden poles fixed into the ground. Between the poles were stretched three strings of fairy lights, one below the other and each of a different colour, yellow, red, and green. Between the first string of fairy lights and the second were lights in the shape of a heart. To the left and to the right of thc heart were more lights, diamond-shaped. The heart lights were red and, compared with the mini bulbs used in the strings, their bulbs were
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Partial Recall
of a bigger diameter. The diamond shapes had lights of a deep yellow colour. The electricians installing the lights were young lads in trousers and body-hugging singlets. With pliers in their hands and rubber flip-flops on their feet, their dark skin glistening with sweat, they moved from pole to pole on wooden stepladders placed on bicycle-trolleys, making sure that when the lights were switched on every one of them twinkled. O n the pavement, wherever room could be found, makeshift
roadside paan shop. There was a man sitting on the packing-case. He was Bankey Lal; profession: plumber. The packing-case was his office. I said I was a journalist, and, for want of anything better to say, I showed off my knowledge of toilet cisterns. I told him that I repaired my own. He probably thought that I was off my head but offered to help all the same. 'Pradeep Srivastava is not going to be at home', Bankey La1 said. 'Not today, when all the mela organizers are out collecting
open .stallshad sprung up. A length of nylon cord tied to a metal railing served as the poster stall. Posters hung from the cord, attached to it with clothes pegs. O n e of the posters said 'Everyone
funds. But I can show you where he lives. You may have to come
loves me'. It showed five golden-haired toddlers playing with
man with a small paunch standing outside a paint shop. 'That's him', Bankey La1 said. I wanted to thank him for escort-
plastic toys and learning blocks. Another said 'Welcome' in big letters. Tired-looking men and women sat on the pavement,
back later.' We hadn't gone very far wheu he pointed to a short, thickset
They did not need to set up stalls, even makeshift ones, and
ing me but before I could do so he had vanished and probably returned to his perch on the packing-case. Srivastava was the secretary of the Dadhikando Samiti, and,
were only waiting for the sun to set to unpack the goods. These
like several other Samiti members, he was an advocate. He said he
they would spread out on the ground, on the same sheet that was covering them. They were all waiting for the mela to begin.
was still busy with the arrangements and had many things to
under a fierce sun, their goods covered with grimy plastic sheets.
Week after week, the forecast had said 'thundery weather' but the sky had remained clear. The monsoon had failed once again.
As I bicycled down Muir Road, the air on the skin felt like flames. Men, both young and old, sat on the front steps ofhouses, fanning themselves with anything that came to hand, an envelope, a
attend to, but seemed eager to talk all the same. 'Though Dadhikando melas are also held at other places in Allahabad', he said, 'they are nothing compared with the show we put up in Rajapur. Our light decoration extends for two kilometres, the longest of any mela in Allahabad, and we draw the biggest crowds. The float parade will start after midnight. If you
piece of cardboard, a newspaper, a handkerchief. I was looking for
come around nine you'll be able to see one of the floats parked
a place with some shade, where I could stop awhile and find
right here, outside the shop. Allahabad's Dusshera is famous all
out where the 'office-bearers' of the Shree Krishna Dadhikando
over India and it is time its Dadhikando became famous too. Last
Samiti, Rajapur, lived. Their names, followed by their profession if they were advocates, had appeared in 'AroundTown'. But places
year a TV channel from Lucknow covered us in the news.' I asked him if he knew how old the mela was.
with shade are hard to find in Rajapur. When I finally stopped, it wasn't under a tree but in front of a packing-case kept beside a
'It's very old and goes back to British times. I have papers at home to prove this. Do you want to see them?'
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Partial Recall
He gave me his telephone number and sped offin the direction of Sadar Bazaar on his scooter. I thought I would call him but
women and children, sometimes accompanied by a husband or brother, gathered around stalls selling traditional mela goods:
never did. Before leaving, Srivastava had introduced me to the owner of the paint shop. A busy-looking man in his mid twenties, he was
plastic xylophones and rattles, toy kitchen sets and doctor sets, baba suits, glass bangles, powders and fairness creams that faked popular brands. Lodged between the stalls were food and ice
also the person who had put up the money for the float that Srivastava wanted me to see. We shook hands but he did not tell
cream carts. I stopped by a tattooist and watched him at work.
me his name and nor did I ask.
him. O n the sheet, meticulously drawn in black ink, were rows
H e sat on the pavement, a sheet ofhandmade paper in front of
H e said, 'Dadhikando celebrates the childhood ofLord Krishna
of motifs, each motif repeated several times: a half moon, a half
and everyone participates in it. Even the poorest man will make a donation. If the city's been spared natural disasters and epi-
moon and cross, a coiled snake, a swastika, a flower vase with a single flower, an O M sign, a da'ger, three dots arranged in the
demics, it's because the people here are deeply religious.'
form of a triangle, a lotus, a peacock, a scorpion, a turtle, Hanuman, a heart with an arrow through it and the word dil written
A delivery van carrying Berger Paints drew alongside. H e went up to the driver and signed a piece ofpaper that the driver handed
in Hindi, and another with dil written in English. Hidden away
him. H e then called out to his shop assistant to unload the cans
in a rectangular tin box, the size of a biscuit tin, were the instru-
of paint.
ments of torture. A young man wanted his name tattooed. From his close-
Paint wasn't the only thing being unloaded in Kajapur that afternoon. Bicycling back, I saw loudspeakers being unloaded too. Big conical loudspeakers, the name of the loudspeaker company stencilled along the rim, were stacked beside every lamppost I passed. In the evening, Muir Road looked like fairyland. The lights on
cropped hair and strong physique he looked like an army cadet,
-
and very likely was one. He asked how much the tattoo would cost. Two rupees for every letter of the Hindi alphabet and double that for English, he was told. He had one other question: would it hurt? 'About as much as an ant bite', said the tattooist.
either side ofthe road faded and flashed, and for the first time I saw
T h e young man sat down on his haunches and stretched out
that there were strings of lights above as well. These were chasing
his arm in front of him, the fist closed. H e had a broad forearm,
lights, placed ten inches apart, forming a kind of low canopy. The loudspeakers played Bollywood hits, but the music wasn't ear-
with space on it for a lot more tattoos than just his name. T h e
splitting yet. A sound like that of twenty motor cars, their engines
spirit and cleaned a small area ofthe skin. He then took out a small
rewed up, came from the light controllers, one of them installed
battery-operated drill from the tin box. Two wires connected the
near the Hanuman temple. Bunches of thin electrical wires
drill to the batteries. After dipping the bit into a bottle filled with
connected the controllers to the lights, making them flash or
tattoo ink, he gently ~ r e s s e dit into the skin. The man winced for
fade or give the chasing effect. Dressed in their best clothes,
a second and watched the letter R form before his eyes. T h e letter
tattooist wet a piece of rag with what certainly wasn't denatured
120
Partial Recall T h e tarpaulin flaps are buttoned down o n the windows of the state transport bus all the way up to Jejuri.
was still wet and smudgy when the tattooist lifted the drill and wrote out the next letter, A, and then the third, M. T h e three indistinct letters ran into each other and the tattooist wiped them with the same rag. The letters now looked bright and clean, as though a computer had printed them.
A cold wind keeps whipping and slapping a corner of the tarpaulin at your elbow.
It was past nine and there was still no sign of the float. I made enquiries at the paint shop but the owner I had spoken to earlier was not there and the others didn't seem to know. I started to make
You look down the roaring road. You search for signs of daybreak in what little light spills o u t of the bus.
my way home. At the Hanuman temple was a TV cameraman, standing very still in the middle of Muir Road, shooting the crowds streaming past and the twinkling fairy lights.
.
('The Bus')
After 'a bumpy ride' when 'all the countryside you get to see' is 'Your own divided face in a pair of on an old man's nose', Jejuri-Bandra-Jejuri O n a visit to Pune in September 2004 to see Arun Kolatkar, who had been seriously ill and who died that week, I read in the Times
the bus comes to a halt 'in front of the priest' who has been patiently waiting for it all morning. And this is why: 'purring softly1,the bus has
of India a report on the changing face of Jejuri. Until then,
A catgrin o n its face
although I knew that Jejuri was a town in western Maharashtra,
I had not seen it in this way. For me, as for many others, it had always been associated with a book by that name. It came as a shock, then, to read that Jejuri also existed outside the imagination
and a live, ready to eat pilgrim \
held between its teeth. ('The Priest')
of its readers, that it was like any other place on the map, with ordinary people walking about its ordinary streets and living their
faith. At its heart, and at the heart of all of Kolatkar's work, lies a
day-to-day lives. This 'real'Jejuri, which city newspapers reported
moral vision, whose basis is the things of this world, precisely,
on and information technology was transforming, had seemed unreal and abstract to me at the time; it still does.
rapturously observed. So, a common doorstep is revealed to be a
The main attraction of Jejuri is the temple dedicated to Khan-
once you begin to count, has eighteen arms; and the rundown
doba, a folk god popular with the nomadic and pastoral commu-
Maruti temple, where nobody comes to worship but is home to
Only incidentally is Jejuri about a temple town or matters of
pillar on its side, Yes./ That's what it is'; the eight-arm-goddess,
nities of Maharashtra and north Karnataka. Arun Kolatkar's
a mongrel bitch and her puppies, is, for that reason, 'nothing
jejuri is a record of a visit to the town. Here are the opening
less than the house of god.' T h e matter-of-fact tone is easy to get
verses:
wrong, and Kolatkar's Marathi critics got it badly wrong, finding
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Partial Recall models of dentures, hands, arms, legs, eyes, and breasts. Also on
it to be cold, flippant, at best sceptical. They were forgetting, of course, that the clarity of Kolatkar's observations would not be possible without abundant sympathy for the person or animal (or even inanimate object) being observed; forgetting, too, that without abundant sympathy for what was being observed the
sale were wax-covered photocopies of hundred-rupee banknotes and a wax sheet with a row oftiny protuberances down the middle, which I could not immediately identify. It was a model of the spine and the tiny protuberances were the cartilage discs. T h e models corresponded to specific boons the pilgrims sought.
poems would not be the acts of attention they are. The last poem in the book is 'The Railway Station'. In it, from the stationmaster
For the childless was the doll; for those who wanted money, the
to 'the young novice at the tea stall', no one is prepared to tell the narrator 'when the next train is due'. T h e book had opened with
banknote; for those anxious to own property, the house; for those who wished to avoid a trip to the dentist, the set of teeth; and for
daybreak; it closes with sunset:
those looking for relief from back pain, the spine. It had started to drizzle. The pilgrims contin'ued to arrive, unmindful of the
the setting sun large as a wheel
Apart from a 'young woman' who arranges 'A Little Pile of Stones' in the belief that if the pile does not topple over she will have a long and happily married life and a 'teen age bride on her
rain that was now falling steadily. They stood around the stalls, made their purchase, and continued on their way to Mount Mary.
I hesitated for a bit, then crossed the road to join the stream of '
people who had lit their candles and made their offerings and were now headed in the opposite direction, towards Bandra
knees' who performs a ritual under the watchful eyes of a smiling
Station. But before doing so I bought, out of an old collecting
priest, ready-to-eat pilgrims are absent from Jejuri. T h e opposite
habit, a banknote and a few body parts.
was true on the day I visited the Bandra Fair in Bombay. Held every September for one week to coincide with the feast that
Our Blessed Virgin's counterpart in Jejuri is Yeshwant Rao. Called 'only a second class god', he is not much to look at:
follows the nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I had gone there on the evening of the last day, which explained the rush of pilgrims on the roads that led to Mount Mary Church. T h e BEST bus I was in kept getting stuck in the traffic and it seemed quicker to walk the rest of the way. T h e crowd that had looked like a mass of slow-moving ants from my window seat in the upper deck felt more like a swiftly flowing river once I was part of it. Stalls lined the pavement, and I had to push hard against the current to get to
Yeshwant Rao, mass of basalt, bright as any post box, the shape of protoplasm or a king size lava pie thrown against the wall, without an arm, a leg or even a single head.
them. They were selling candles and what, to me, looked like toys:
While he cannot 'double your money', 'triple your land hold-
motor cars, houses, doll-like figures, all made of wax. Some of
ings', or 'put a child inside your wife', in some things the 'mass of basalt' is as effective as Our Lady of the Mount:
the toys, unlike any other toys I'd seen, were body parts: wax
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Partial Recall
Yeshwant Rao. He's the god you've got to meet. If you're short of a limb, Yeshwant Rao will lend you a hand and ger youback on your feet. In Dilip Chitre's short film on Kolatkar, made for the Sahitya Akademi in 2004, there are shots of Jejuri, including one of Yeshwant Rao. H e looks exactly as Kolatkar has described him, a rock 'the shape of protoplasm' and daubed with red paint. Another shot shows the replicas of the limbs-a crudely made arm, a leg-that the pilgrims have offered at the shrine. Fittingly for a god in rural Maharashtra, the replicas are life-size and fashioned from wood. Stone Carvers' Lane A friend tells me about the Kartik Mela at Baluaghat. Situated on the Jamuna, Baluaghat is about five kilometres, or thirty minutes by rickshaw, from where I live. Having spent my life in those parts
perhaps because it was three in the afternoon and everyone was taking their siesta, the roads had little traffic. T h e only time the rickshaw I was travelling in slowed down was when it neared its destination, and then too because of the condition of the road, which was full ofcrater-sized potholes when it was there at all. O n either side were cowsheds, and, each time I passed what looked like a house, it had acow or calftied to a stake outside. Occasionally, an advocate's nameplate was tackedon adoor, the letters indistinct and the door paint peeling. Behind the door, which was firmly shut, it seemed unlikely that any human activity, let alone legal activity, took place. A rusted metal sign advertising a P C 0 tilted towards the road, and, while a grunting pig ran alongside the rickshaw before finally overtaking it, the rickshaw swerved to avoid another pothole. A girl stood in a doorway, a thick science textbook in her hand but her eyes focused elsewhere; a woman sat by an open drain, weaving a basket. As the afternoon light weakened and the gold turned to a pale yellow, I wondered why I was making this trip to Baluaghat.
ofAllahabad from where the Ganges was never more than a short walk away, going to Baluaghat was a bit like going to a foreign country. But a foreign country, as I knew only too well, that in the end would turn out to be a mirror image of the native one. Located in the old part of town, to get there from Civil Lines involved negotiating the lanes of Johnstonganj and Bansmandi, the ldtter a specialized bazaar dealing in all things related to wood, from sawn logs, planks, and boards to dowry furniture (armchairs
It came to me then, as it had earlier too, that the urban face of Allahabad, created during colonial times, was only a mask. T h e wide roads, the crenellated houses, the gravelled drives, were as a
and sofa sets upholstered in printed velvet, chaise-longues, dining tables with Formica tops). There is never a time ofyear when Bansmandi is not crowded, and since I'd decided to make the trip
concealed from myselfby surrounding myselfwith a large number
piece of theatre on which the curtain had long been rung. In the sixty years since Independence, most of the buildings of the Raj had collapsed through age or neglect or had been torn down, and, as the stones of empire turned to dust, they laid bare Allahabad's essentially rural features. This unpleasant fact, I realized, I had
on the day before Diwali, which also happened to be the last
of books and a handful offriends, all ofwhom lived in other cities. In one of these books, which I had taken down from my shelves at random, I once came across a passage which I had been looking
Friday of Ramadan, I expected it to be even more so. Surprisingly,
for without knowing that I was looking for it. It put in perspective
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Partial Recall
what I now saw around me. 'The life of the dynasty is the life of the town', wrote the great fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun in The Muqaddimah. 'If the dynasty is of short duration, life in the town will stop at the end of the dynasty. Its civilization will recede, and the town will fall into ruins.' Nirad C. Chaudhuri's oft-quoted dedication in An Autobiography of an Unknown Indian- 'All that was good and living/ within us/ was made, shaped, and quickened' by British rule-if applied less to the subject population and more to ci'ties like Allahabad, conceals an important truth. The unofficial name of the road leading from the Baluaghat crossing to the Jamuna is Patthar wali galli, or Stone Carvers' Lane. This is where the mela is supposed to be held, but except for a few stalls selling cheap crockery (cups and saucers, mugs, dinner plates) or cheap plastic goods ('All items Rs. 51-'), there was no sign of the mela. For a moment I even wondered if I had come to the wrong place. Little by little, as a tourist might, I gathered that the mela proper, the one that I had come to see, would begin after Diwali and continue for the next fourteen days, concluding on Kartik Purnima, when people in large numbers would take a ritual bath in the Jamuna at Baluaghat, just as they would in rivers and tanks all across the country, in the Ganges in Haridwar, in the Mahanadi in Cuttack, in the Gandak in Sonepur, in Pushkar in Ajmer. This larger significance of Kartik Purnima I learned not by talking to the sullen stall keepers of Baluaghat but by googling the phrase later. By the side ofthe road, at the head of Stone Carvers' Lane, stood a row of idols. In front of them sat a young boy, chipping away at a fresh block, teasing out the figure in the grey stone. I could make out some of the gods-Hanuman, Ganesh, the more obvious ones-but not all. The goddesses particularly were difficult to identify, and I sought the boy's help. H e looked up and pointed
to an elderly man, who was wearing a lungi and vest and busy talking to someone. 'Could you help me with the names of these gods?' I asked him. 'Which one do you want to buy?' 'Well actually I just wanted to . . .' I had not completed the sentence when he turned his back and resumed the conversation I had interrupted. Clearly, Baluaghat was not the place to come to ifyou wanted a quick lesson in Hindu iconography. A few steps away was a stall selling clay toys. After my encounter with the idols, or mort precisely with the idol seller, I turned to the toys with a sense of relief, knowing that I was on home territory here, that the toys would not show up my ignorance in the same way that the gods had. The stall, arranged in tiers, stepladder fashion, had all the usual mela favourites-motor cars, flowerpots, hens, policemen, yogis, guavas-but then came something that, in all my years of mela going, I had not seen before, something that left me completely stumped. This was a standing figure, about the height of a man's palm, with a pointed mouselike face, coloured electric blue. Its slit eyes were outlined in red, with black eyelashes, and there was a triangular silvery mark on its forehead. It wore a yellow gown with attached hood. The gown covered it from head to toe, so that except for the hands, which were of the same electric blue colour as the face, no other part of the figure was visible. I asked the stall keeper what this strange object represented and he said it was an 'alien', using the English word. I later learnt that the 'alien' was based on a character in a Bollywood film starring Hrithik Roshan and Preity Zinta. Stone Carvers' Lane ended at the river. With boats idling in the water, as if they were waiting for someone to arrive, it appeared to be an idyllic scene. It looked desolate as well, in the way idyllic scenes often do.
128
Partial Recall
At the bottom of the lane was a stone carver's shack, outside which sat a well-built young man covered in grey dust, gently tapping at a stone with a hammer and chisel. Once bitten, I hesitated before putting my question to him. 'What are you carving?' 'Jagadamba', he said, after a long silence, and then shot back a question of his own. 'You from Allahabad?'
Speaking of Posters Often, putting my eye to the peephole, if it's the courier, the milkman, the vegetable seller, or the dhobi who's rung the bell, I find him studying the poster pasted on the front door. He's seen the poster before, on previous visits to the house, but still looks at it as though he's seeing it for the first time. Based on the Hindu belief that the dead, after departing from
'Yes. From near Rajapur, in Civil Lines.'
this life, have to cross the Vaitarani, the shit-filled river of hell,
'It doesn't look so to me, not from your appearance.'
the poster shows a young fair-complexioned woman, her eyes
'Well, Rajapur is a long way off from Baluaghat, which is
chastely lowered, crossing the river, holding the tail of a cow. Also
why people look different there.' We continued in this fashion for a while. The conversation was
in the water are two fire-breathing dragon-like creatures and a drowning man. While the woman is reaping the rewards of good
getting nowhere and I did not know how to extricate myself from
karma-she
it. There were flat chisels and point chisels lying around and
in her lifetime-the
I picked up a flat chisel, feeling the blade with my thumb.
in the poster show, his ordeal, without a cow to p i d e him across
'Where do you get these from?' 'Why do you want to know?' 'I'm interested in tools generally. You could say that I collect them.' 'We have our suppliers.The tools come mostly from Rajasthan.' H e continued to work on the stone, on one of Jagadamba's four arms, as we talked. Stone dust filled the grooves and he removed it with a brush. For the first time I noticed that the idol had paint on it, streaks ofyellow, red, and black. H e was removing the paint bit by bit, by tapping the painted area with a chisel, which he held at a thirty-degree angle to the stone. 'You're taking off the paint', I said. It was an unnecessary remark and I regretted making it.
'I could even take the skin offyour flesh', he replied, giving the paint another tap.
may have, for instance, donated a cow to a Brahmin man suffers for lack of it. As the other panels
Shit River, has only just begun. There is a story told by T.J. Clark about the Suprematist painter Kasimir Malevich and his model for a statue of Lenin: Malevich who, like all other Bolshevik artists, has been working to express the greatness of Lenin in a model for his monument, proudly exhibited a huge pedestal composed of a mass of agricultural and industrial tools and machinery. On top of the pile was the 'figure' of Lenin-a simple cube without insignia. 'But where's Lenin?' the artist was asked. With an injured air he pointed to the cube. Anybody could see that if they had a soul, he added. But the judges without hesitation turned down the work of art. There must be a real figure of Lenin, they reason, if the singleminded peasant is to be inspired. The bazaar artist who made the poster needed no Soviet judge to tell him about inspirational art or how best to get his message
130
Partial Recall
across to 'the single-minded peasant'. Crudely drawn and brightly coloured, the figures in the poster are 'real' in the way that comic-
Ironically, these depicters and narrators ofhell punishments could on occasion be thieves themselves. A tenth-century collection of
book stereotypes are real. T h e carter who overloads the cart, the grocer who sells you short, the woman who goes for an abortion, the cat burglar who breaks into your house, the profiteer who deals in the black market, the butcher who sells meat are, in separate panels, shown committing the ill deed, the bad karma. T h e panels below them show its terrible consequences. T h e offender is tied to
Jaina stories in Kannada tells of a picture-showman who was
a pole or stuffed in a vat, and as flames leap up from below a burly
there existed in the oral tradition of the Garodas, a community of
two-horned demon figure, spear in hand, disembowels him or, in
picture-showmen in Gujarat, a description of a member of their
the case of the abortionist, her. Some of the punishments are an
profession: 'He moves around Gith a painted scroll. H e wears a
attempt at humour, ofthe rustic sort. T h e carter's punishment for overloading is that he is harnessed to a cart and made to do the
sacred mark on his forehead and a turban on his head. O n his
hanged for stealing. While he kept his listeners enthralled by telling them punishment stories ([he horned demons and boiling vats of my poster), other members of his gang made off with the bags of paddy belonging to paddy-merchants sitting in the audience. Until thirty years ago, according to Tyotindra Jain,
work of the bullock. The load he is pulling is a smiling giant. Two
shoulder he carries a bag and there is a stick in his hand.' T h e middle-aged man I had bought the poster from did not
panels show the crimes of bribery and adultery. In these, both
have a stick in his hand nor a turban on his head. H e was wearing
the bribe-giver and the bribe-taker, both the adulterer and the
a shirt and trousers, and before giving me the poster had rolled it
adulteress, are punished. Though her partner in crime is punished
up and secured i t with a rubber band. But he could have been a
in the usual way, by being tied to a pole and disembowelled, the adulteress is shown lying on the floor with a pole sticking out from
Garoda of Gujarat or a third-century Jaina mendicant, just as I could have been sitting in the attentive crowd, among the believers.
her thighs. While she undergoes her torture, the two-horned devil
My other mela poster, similarly printed on cheap paper and
sticks out his long tongue at her.
priced at one rupee, is a map. Though it saysTirthraj Prayag Map
I had bought the poster at a local mela, as an example of modern
in English and Tirthraj Prayag ka naksha in Hindi at the top,
bazaar art, except that there was nothing modern about it.
it's not a map in the traditional sense. O n three sides, forming a
Early Jaina literature of the third century CE has references to a
border, are pictures ofgods, goddesses, and rishis: Vishnu, Shankar,
'mankha', a kind of mendicant 'whose hands were occupied by a
Siddhanatha, Mahavira, Balmukunda, Lalita Devi, Gorakhnath,
picture board'. Wherever a small crowd could be gathered, at a
Kuber, Dharmaraj, Shesha, Markandeya,Vedavyas, Yama, Garuda,
mela or shrine, you would find, among the fortune tellers, wrestl-
Dattatreya, Bharadwaj, Kalabhairava, Narasimha, Satyanarayana,
ers, acrobats, and mimes, a 'mankha' or more often a picture-
and Rama, Lakshmana, and Sita. In the foreground are the rivers,
showman, who, combining a display of gruesome visual images
sky blue in colour, with tiny figures taking a holy dip, the bathers'
with the art of storytelling, would tell his listeners about good
heads no bigger than the letter 0.There are boats in the water, a swimmer, and images of the river deities: 'Yamunaji' (sitting on a
karma and bad karma, about Shit River and the way across it.
132
Partial Recall
turtle), 'Ganpji' (sitting on a crocodile), and 'Saraswatiji' (sitting on a swan). Bridges cross the river. O n one bridge are pedestrians,
young man with a shaven head and grinning from ear to ear. Some are bending over those who are sitting on the ground to get
on the other a railway train, with a squiggle of smoke coming out of the engine. Across the bridge, against a bright ell ow back-
a better view of what the woman is selling. One of the maps is
ground, is the city of Allahabad. As in tourist maps, Tirthraj Prayag Map shows places that are
line. Another map is without any buildings. In fact, nothing in it
ofinterest tovisitors.The places are not marked with a dot or circle but a small picture. There are pictures of the clock tower, the
similar to the one I have, with the buildings shown in a straight
,
corresponds to any feature you might associate with a city map, even an imaginary one. It shows four rows of Hindu gods, the entire pantheon as it were, and nothing else. IVo building. N o
museum, the Kamala Nehru Hospital, the university, Muir Col-
bridges. No river even. This version, preserved only in Henri
lege, Khusrau Bagh, the railway station, Anand Bhavan, and the
h , I haven't seen it anywhere else, Cartier-Bresson's ~ h o t o ~ r a pfor
fort. Allahabad is not a city of temples, and the map has pictures
comes closest to that imagine& reality called 'Tirthraj Pra~ag', the Lord of Pilgrim Places.
of the few there are. Except for the fort and the clock tower, the buildings, arranged in straight lines and equidistant from each other, look the same. It matters little that they do, or that there is
Uncle Mulk
in the map only one unnamed road, snaking past the railway
Everyone dies, but some people, writers particularly, get a second
station. Meant for ordinary pilgrims, who will treat it as a divine
life. This second life takes many forms: biography, memoir, a
object and put it up with the other framed gods on their walls, it
volume of uncollected work, selections of letters, a public archive
does not aim to represent things objectively in space. The map is purely imaginary with the names of some real buildings in it.
that preserves, for future researchers, the writer's papers. Not in
A Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph, taken at the Allahabad
India, though. Here, whether writer or not, you live only once. About ten years ago, I was in Bombay researching illustrations
Kumbh in 1966, shows a woman sitting on the ground with
for a history of Indian literature in English. A rich source of illus-
pilgrim maps spread out around her. Some of the maps are stuffed
trative material, like frontispieces and amply worded title pages,
inside a plastic shopping basket, next to which is a small, unsteady
are books published in the nineteenth century, and I was mainly
pile of religious books. The woman's bangled right arm is stretched
hunting for them but also for some later titles. O n e of the books
over the maps to receive a glinting coin which a man is about
I was looking for but couldn't find, and which none of Bom-
to place in her open palm. The man, except for his hand, is not in
bay's libraries seemed to have in their catalogue, was Mulk Raj
the picture, but others are, crowding round the woman. They are rural folk. From their clothes, especially the identically
Anand's The Lost Child. Published in a limited edition by the
tied turbans, they seem to belong to the same community and to come from the same village. Some of the men are standing, look-
first book. If anyone had a copy, I reasoned, he would.
ing at the maps, others are sitting on the ground, among them a
porte-cochi.re, and rose windows, is among the few remaining
English sculptor and typographer Eric Gill in 1934, it wasAnand7s Anand's house in Cuffe Parade, with its gavel drive, cupolas,
134
Partial Recall
colonial houses on that road, the others having been pulled down to make way for high-rise buildings. Surrounded by them, the house, in comparison, looked Lilliputian. I had gone past it many times but had never been inside. One evening the poet Adil Jussawalla, who lived across the road from Anand and knew him
its glossy red cover, looked like an Indian wedding invitation. It was of the same thickness, too. O n the cover, in gold letters, it said The Lost Child and two lyrical tales by Mulk Raj Anand. Anand pulled his chair closer to the lamp and, sitting down, '
inscribed the book before giving it to me, signing himself 'Uncle
well, suggested that we go and see him. Anand, who was in his nineties, answered the door himself. H e
Mulk'. One of Anand's Indian publishers had brought out the
was a short man with large, protruding eyes, and was dressed in a
explained its celebratory get-up. Printed on cream-coloured paper
loose khadi kurta and pyjamas. His voice, gently authoritarian in
with the text printed in a shade of brown, the book was designed
tone, was the voice of someone who, in his time, had been a dandy
by Dolly Sahiar.
book as a gift for him on his ninetieth birthday, which partly
and heavy smoker, though I'm not sure if he had been either. He
'The Lost Child' is about a lirtle boy's visit to a village fair with
pointed to two cushioned easy chairs, which we took, while he sat on the one beside a standard lamp, a side table next to it.
his parents. There, he looks longingly at jugglers, balloon sellers,
The room in which Anand received us had a larger room at-
sweetmeat stalls, and the roundabout, knowing that if he makes a demand his parents will drag him away. At some point he gets
tached to it, which was probably Anand's study. Parts of the
separated from them, and realizing what has happened begins to
study, where the light of the standard lamp didn't reach, were in
cry. Seeing his distress, a kind man takes him around the mela
darkness. I scanned the bookshelves but, disappointingly, they
again. He offers to buy the child anything he wants but the child
were crammed with papers rather than books. Presently, a servant
is inconsolable. All he manages to say is, 'I want my mother, I
emerged from the shadows carrying a bottle of rum, three glas-
want my father.' As Anand explains in a brief afterword, the story draws on
ses, and warm water in a jug. Anand's longtime companion, Dolly Sahiar, hovered about. Those who knew Anand in his last decades say that he had a
a childhood experience but is also an allegory. He also dwells on the circumstances of its first publication:
repertoire of stories which he repeated to all visitors. The stories, from the days when Anand was a young writer, were about his encounters with the Bloomsbury set in London and his meetings with Gandhi in Sabarmati Ashram. Unfortunately, I recall little of what he said that evening. At some point, I asked him about
The Lost Child, hoping he would walk up to a bookshelf and get me the book. He said he did not have the edition I wanted, nor did he know anyone who might, but as we were leaving he went inside and came back with something which, from a distance, with
The story 'The Lost Child' was written in the early hours of a morning in a room in Cambridge, from persistent recall in my subconscious, of a poem by Guru Nanak, 'We are all children lost in the world's fair.' This memory brought back the panic I had felt when I had myself got lost, at the age of six, in a fair in Kaleshwar village, on the banks of the river Beas in Kangra valley of the Punjab Himalayas. The story was sent to seven magazines, and all sent it back with the usual editor's rejection slip.
136
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The artist Eric Gill read the story and graciously offered to print it, with two other lyric tales of mine, 'The Eternal Why' and 'The Conqueror1,as a little book decorated with an engraving, on his press at Piggots, High Wycornbe, Buckinghamshire, as a consolation for a budding author. Few today will remember 'The Lost Child'; fewer still would be interested in its publication history or in the fate of Anand's papers. His first published story, like the papers he left behind when he died, has vanished into the thin Indian air, much as the announcement I once heard over the crackling public-address system at a mela has. It was about a boy who had gone missing. T h e boy's name, the announcer said, was Aman. H e was 6 years old. W h e n last seen, he was wearing a blue shirt and grey shorts and carrying a balloon in his hand.
The Bradman Class
G.H. Hardy's A Mathematician? Apology, first published in 1940, begins:
.
It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he and other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings; there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. Times have changed and few critics would today agree with Hardy's assessment of their minds. A Mathematician?Apology is not, though, about the distinction between makers and explainers. W h a t casts a darkening melancholic shadow across its pages is the opening sentence. Hardy continues: 'If then I find myself writing not mathematics but "about" mathematics, it is aconfession of weakness, for which I may rightly be scorned or pitied by younger or more vigorous mathematicians. I write about mathematics because, like any other mathematician w h o is past sixty, I have n o longer the freshness of mind, the energy, or the patience t o carry o n effectively with m y proper job.'
140
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The Bradman C h s
141
There is nothing sadder in the annals ofcreativity than what has
of the Mint; 'his great creative days were over' by the time he
just been said, and for poets it has a familiar ring. Coleridge, who was just thirty at the time, experiencing the loss of the mind's freshness, spoke of
reached forty, the discovery of the elliptic orbit came when he was only thirty-seven. The old are of no use to mathematics, and the great mathematicians, as if aware of this preference, died early. In a moving passage, Hardy remembers them: 'Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. . . If a man of mature age loses interest in and abandons mathematics, the loss is not likely to be very serious either for mathematics or for himself.' Sooner or later it had to happen. Hardy was old. Having pursued a young man's game all his life, he found his 'mature age' all the more unbearable. (Watching cricket was his other passion and his highest term of praise 'in the Bradman class'. In the week he died he told his sister, 'If I knew that I was going to die today, I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores.') C.I? Snow, in his Foreword to Apology, compares Hardy to a great athlete who has 'gone . . . over the hill', but where athletes take to drink he 'took to something like despair'. When he couldn't take the despair any more, Hardy swallowed barbiturates and tried to kill himself. From its first sentence, Apology had been moving towards this decision, and by the time it ends his mind is virtually made up.
A gief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
in 'Dejection'. But there is a difference between the mathematician's g i e f and the poet's. For the poet, the possibility that the grief will lift is still open; any moment might bring the 'deep delight' of 'Kubla Khan'. Further, the loss of the 'beauty-making power' has been recorded in apoem, the very fact of its existence proof that the poet's 'energy' and 'patience', whose loss Hardy mourns, are undiminished. Something similar happens in Hopkins's 'Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend': birds build-but not I build; no, but strain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, 0 lord of life, send my roots rain. When Hopkins wrote the sonnet, the dark rain-bearing clouds had already gathered. In fact, the utterance 'send my roots rain' is the rain he seeks, ending his despair. This miraculous change of weather is not something the mathematician is likely to experience. O f all the arts, then, mathematics is the most cruel, and the most attractive: 'If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly no one has a fairer chance of gatifying them than a mathematician. His subject is the most curious of all.' Hardy then adds a word of caution: 'No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game.' Newton gave it up at fifty and became Master
I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford. Since then I have suffered from that steady deterioration which is the common fate of elderly men and particularly of elderly mathematicians. A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas. It is plain now that my life, for what it is worth, is finished, and that nothing I can do can perceptibly increase or diminish its value. Snow saw him regularly after the suicide attempt and describes the visits: 'He talked a little, nearly every time I saw him,
Partial Recall
154
"about" the poetThomas Stearns Eliot? or my friend "the Possum"? Let him rest in peace. I can only repeat, but with the urgency of 50 years ago: READ HIM.' In 1976Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri appeared and as far as I know the poets have taken no notice. None felt Williams's despair; none Pound's excitement. Nissim Ezekiel, the author of the following doxology
The Emperor Has No Clothes Kick me around a bit more, 0 Lord. I see at last there's no other way for me to learn your simplest truths. ('The Egoist's Prayers i')
What do you say to someone so painfully honest? The vices I've always had I still have. The virtues I've never had I still do not have. From this Human Way of Life W h o can rescue Man If not his Maker? Do thy duty, Lord. ('The Egoist's Prayers ii')
ought to have looked askance at the man who was more interested in getting small things right:
A hundred Indo-Anglian years, which is an eternity, should have separated Ezekiel (b. 1924) and Kolatkar (b. 193]).Tragically for us, they belong to the same'generation. Ezekiel has not come on the air, neither pro nor con, but Vrinda Nabar has and twice. I mention Miss Nabar since she is a poet as well as an academic, and though I have not seen 'Arun Kolatkar: A Bilingual Poet', I d o recall what she wrote on Jejuri in the Times of India. It has stayed with me not because of anything she says about the poem but because of a policeman she meets in a train. This, briefly, is what happens. Miss Nabar, travelling first class, walks down to the end of the coach and where the door to the toilet should have been she finds this beast in khaki unbuttoning his trousers.
That's no doorstep. It's a pillar on its side. Yes. That's what it is. ('The Doorstep')
This takes up a page of Jejuri. First, what the thing is not: 'no
Fortunately, Miss hTabar is not alone and flies back to her companion who is sitting in the coupe. Miss Nabar will of course say that she was writing not so much about the book as the place from which it took its title, hence the train journey and the need for a toilet. Jejuri, though, is adored less for its reliability as a traveller's guide and more for its, to use a word Miss Nabar should understand, charms as a poem.
doorstep'.Then, what it is: 'a pillar', but, importantly, 'on its side'.
Disappointed, one looks to another critic. In 1977, the Osma-
T h e third line compacts the poem to a syllable. T h e fourth is
nia Journal of English Studies brought out a special number on
whistled into the reader's ear. Now go back for some more of
contemporary Indian poetry in English. Among the contri-
the latest Ezekiel:
butions, M.R. Satyanarayana's 'Jejuri: Arun Kolatkar's Waste
Partial Recall
The Emperor Has No Clothes
Land'. If Miss Nabar comes across as a flirtatious schoolgirl, Satyanarayana is an escapee from one ofthose institutions people often want to escape from but are seldom allowed to. H e now stalks the municipal garden of Indian poetry in English and we don't have so much as a toy gun to shoo him off with. Here are some of the things he says:
never know what the others did and unless answers to this and similar questions are forthcoming, we are not going to get our homemade world. T h e indifference, the incuriosity, will eventually tell, and on us first. To lose sight of another man's work is to lose sight of one's own.
156
His [Kolatkar's] sensibilities have been formed by the western civilization and he articulates them through American speech. It is a very well thought out design o n the part of Kolatkar to have brought the pilgrim to the railway station for the return journey. When the pilgrim arrives at the place by bus he is not yet steeped in 'the spirit of the place'. T h e indicator, the railway track itself, the station master, and the timetable, all these lend themselves t o artistic exploitation in a manner n o other mode of transport could have. Kolatkar's attitude towards his subject might have been inspired by a new theory of humour with is now gaining currency-black humour. Whatever advantage this mode might have vis-a-vis social themes, black humour is at a disadvantage in dealing with H i n d u mythology. There is no trace of a strained translation anywhere.
If Indian poetry in English is to save itself from its lunatic critics, toy guns aren't enough. I think what we need is a switchblade. I have takenjejuri's example to show how a book, which is so evidently a classic, can suffer from critical neglect. T h e same can be said about A.K. Ramanujan's The Striders and Relations, Jayanta Mahapatra's A Rain of Rites, Adil Jussawalla's Missing Person, and Gieve Patel's How Do You Withstand, Body. jejuri, however, is a personal favourite. To me it is like a roadblock, which we have to climb over, or go round, or ram into, or push aside. Miss Nabar, brave girl, at least poses in front of it. We will
157
T h e letters of Indian writers in English may never be published, but in case they are they will open up new areas of the literary terrain. O n e was suggested reoently by Adil Jussawalla in 'Six Authors in Search of a Reader'. Quoting from letters he has received from friends, he tells us what a generation of Indian writers did in the late 1960s and early 1970s when no Indian publisher was interested in their work and they had to find their readers on their own. Sandipan Chattopadhyay's Minibooks, Vilas Sarang's stories in Encounter and London Magazine, and the forming of publishing co-ops like Clearing House and Newground were some of the strategies they adopted. The strategies worked. Chattopadhyay sold 1000 copies of the first Minibook within a week; Sarang's stories are to be brought out by New Directions [they eventually appeared as Fair Tree of the Void, with an introduction by Adil Jussawalla, from Penguin India in 19901; and Clearing House and Newground have published nine poetry titles between them, with more promised. Not every story resurrected from a writer's files is so cheering. Should the executors of the literary estate of R. Parthasarathy allow the publication of his letters to Jayanta Mahapatra, the reader of the future will find that the terrain here is different. O n 4 August 1979 M a h a ~ a t r awrote me a letter. In it, he quoted a paragraph from one of Parthasarathy's letters to him, and I reproduce it here since it refers to this essay:
158
The Emperor Has No Clothes
Partial Recall
159
I have serious doubcs if you should encourage dilletantish writing of the sort displayed by Rabi S. Mishra [see 'A.K. Ramanujan: A Point ofview' in ChandrabhZgZ,No. 1, Summer 19791. It is easy to disclaim are responsibility by saying 'Opinions expressed in Chandrabh* not those of the,editor but individual contributors.' But, in fact, the editor is responsible as it is published only with his approval. I wonder if this is the first in a series of exercises at literary demolition. I wish you would stop it. I enclose a letter which I hope you would be gracious enough to publish in Chandrabh*, No. 2, Winter 1979. This kind of irresponsible writing must not go unanswered. I learn Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is sharpening his knife to cut Rough Passage to size. If this is true, I don't think I am going to be amused by it. If this is Chandrabh~~Z's editorial stance, I am not sure you are serving any useful purpose, and whatever support you might expect, even that would soon be eroded.
with the bird, a n d the bird wonders if it has not gone too far in the
Before I come t o Parthasarathy's letter in ChandrabhZg~a n d
pose, put the aforementioned knife to the g i n d e r a n d watch
his book Rough Passage, I want t o look at the ten sentences
other direction. H e changes tack and begins to speak in the voice of the town's senior citizen, w h o spends his waking hours writing letters to the editor, complaining about the poor street lighting arrangements. 'This kind of irresponsible writing must not go unanswered.' His civic d u t y done, the bird prepares to leave, b u t not before he has surprised everyone in the crowd by coming back instead. H e is n o t any more the friendly uncle b u t a mixture of bawling child, school bully, and streetcorner hood. 'I learn Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is sharpening his knife . . . Ifthis is true, I don't think I a m going t o be amused by it.
. . . I a m not sure you are
serving any useful purpose, and whatever support you might expect, even that would soon be eroded.' I n the end the hood crushes his cheroot and blows a smoke ring. While I, I supthe sparks
fly.
above. T h e y illuminate a period of o u r history as nothing else does. T h e y are also a network of roads that lead the traveller t o the heart of Rough Passage. In his first avian move, Parthasarathy hovers over Rabi
S.
Mishra and then rushes towards the irresponsible editor of Chandra-
bhZgZ w h o encouraged the Sambhalpur dilettante t o fling m u d at A.K. Ramanujan. While he leaves Mishra alone, h e jabs at the editor, 'But, in fact, the editor is responsible . . .' Pleased, h e hops back two steps a n d waits. Is this really, he thinks t o himself, the first in a series of 'literary demolitions' t o be carried o u t by a suicide squad from Mahapatra's house, Tinkonia Bagicha? Well, if it is then there is little our bird can d o about it, a n d he may
Mishra's is an irresponsible and unfortunate exercise in debunking a poet who is generally considered significant. In 1976 . . . I had remarked: 'Ramanujan's repossession, through his poetry, of the past of his family and ofhis sense of himself as a distillation of that past is to me a signal achievement . . .' Unaware of this fundamental aspect of Ramanujan's contribution, Mishra, the English teacher, chastises him for not writing like Pope, Yeats, Eliot or Neruda. Irrelevant as this comparison is, Mishra's attitude is not: it is potentially dangerous . . . Might I suggest that Mishra stay clear of the treacherous waters of Indian English literature when he is so patently unfamiliar with the topography?
already have overreached himself. So what does h e d o ? I n one ear h e hisses, 'I wish you would stop it.' And in the other sings, 'I
So Parthasarathy, in his letter published in ChandrabhZgZ,No. 2,
. . .'
Winter 1979. But what was the cataclysmic event that turned
By now half the neighbourhood's children have fallen in love
the azure waters of Indian poetry in English into a treacherous
enclose a letter which I hope you would be gracious enough
Partial Recall
The Emperor Has No Clothes
swamp? Rabi S. Mishra begins 'A.K. Ramanujan: A Point of
are so meaningless and trivial, there should be nothing to fear in them. And even if we heed the warning, is it true that a shell will burst in our faces ifwe read a poem by Ramanujan alongside one by Yeats? Other questions put themselves: should we read our literature in cork-lined rooms or where voices from outside can enter? Should we attempt to further isolate Indian poetry in English or should we see if it can still find a place under the sun? Should we stifle criticism which seeks to expresses another point ofview or should we watch it with interest? And should we terrorize the editor who publishes this criticism? Now Parthasarathy is no foot Elsewhere in the same letter in Chandrabhzga he says that 'responsible criticism' is absent from the Indian literary scene. 'What exists . . . is invariably laudatory in tone or is intended to damn with Gint praise. . . . There is no evidence in them of either scholarship or of the critical faculty at work.' (Though a sentence in his personal communication to Mahapatra quoted above shows how keen he is to hear criticism other than laudatory: 'I wish you would stop it.') H e continues, 'Those who write are familiar with British or American literature; their terms of reference are usually borrowed from that literature. T h e exercise becomes, as a result, as in Mishra's case, inappropriate and futile.' A lot hinges on how we take the phrase 'responsible criticism', or for that matter 'the critical faculty'. Through clues provided by
160
View' by saying: A study 0fA.K. Ramanujan's poetry leads one to the uncomfortable conclusion that he is incapable of broad patterns of experience. . . . He reflects an inherently narrow range, and with the intellectual thinness of his poems he cannot achieve the depth that should qualify him for a significant poet. Mishra knows this to be a minority opinion and admits his discomfort at the outset. Though ten years ago, writing in Contemporary Indian Poetry in English, S. Nagarajan had made a similar observation: 'Almost all the poems in the new volume [Relations] suffer to some extent from . . . intellectual thinness.' Parthasarathy's response to Mishra is to state that it is 'unfortunate' that Mishra has debunked a poet who is 'generally considered significant'. In the language of the Oxford Book of Children; Verse, the response would translate as follows: There was an old man And he had a calf, And that's half; He took him out of the stall, And put him on the wall, And that's all. Having put the calf on the wall, Parthasarathy reminds Mishra that in 1976 he had decided, on everyone's behalf, the precise nature of Ramanujan's achievement and therefore the subject was closed. By way of advice, he adds that English teachers should approach the calf without making irrelevant allusions to poets from Pope to Neruda; he feels that the attitude underlying it is 'potentially dangerous'.The argument is odd. Ifsome comparisons
161
Parthasarathy himself, we know what he would like to exclude from its scope: everything which runs counter to his opaque statements on poetry; selected acts of literary demolition; most references to British and American writers. I have a lot to say on Parthasarathy's opacities and will not go into them just now. So far as demolition is concerned, one knows it to be an inseparable part of the literary process, and ParthaSarathy, who taught at a
162
Partial Recall
college before joining Oxford University Press, couldn't have so quickly lost the perspective that comes in the classroom to not see that ifpoets are struck down by one generation of readers they can bounce back with the next; and o n the critical necessity ofplacing a work both among its near (Tamil Brahmin, Poona Parsi, Goan Catholic) a n d distant (Catholic, WASP, Mormon, Jewish) relatives, there is Octavio Paz's 'On Criticism':
. . . the space created by critical action, the place where works meet
The Emperor Has No Clothes
163
Galdos, Turgenev, Flaubert, Henry James, the whole fight of modern enlightenment is against this. It is not of any one country. I name four great modern novelists because, perhaps, the best of their work has been an analysis, a diagnosis of this disease.
Provincialism is more than an ignorance, it is ignorance plus a lust after uniformity. It is a latent malevolence, often an active malevolence. (SelectedProse)
and confront each other, is a no man's land in our countries. T h e mission of criticism is not to invent works but to establish relations between them. . . . In this sense, criticism has a creative function: it creates a literature (a perspective, an order) out of individual works. This is precisely what our criticism has failed to do. And that is why there is no Hispano-American literature, even though there exists a whole body of important works. (Alternating Current)
The word 'provincialism' brings into focus the drift of Partha-
There are, Paz says, two complementary tasks before a critic: 'to
T h e poems 0fA.K. Ramanujan are a case in point. How are they
show that Hispano-American works are a single literature, a field
to be seen?Are they going to be buried like a treasure and guarded
of antagonistic relations; and to describe the relationships of this literature to other literatures.'
headed freak with a long tail (minus the tail, its two-headedness
sarathy's Hindu revivalist mind. Indian literature in English is in its pupal stage, which we can either preserve as a specimen or leave alone in the open to face the mild and sometimes inclement weather.
by a hound; worshipped like a village deity; turned into a two-
Parthasarathy and I attach different charges to 'responsible
could be one way oflooking at it, but this is not what I here mean)?
criticism', just as Daruwalla and I did to 'poetic congeries'. If
O r are they going to be read and commented on, praised and
criticism has the health of the literary community in mind, its
dispraised, as all poems are?
frame of reference should. not be bound by a country's political boundary. The superstitious manner in which Parthasarathy refers to 'British or American' literature and to critics who 'borrow' from them was analysed by Pound in a 19 17 essay. 'Provincialism the Enemy' begins: PROVINCLALISM consists in (a) An ignorance of the manners, customs, and nature of people living outside one's own village, parish or nation. (b) A desire to coerce others into uniformity.
These are some of the issues raised by Parthasarathy's Chandra-
bh*
letter, but peripherally. In its main part he says that
. . . Ramanujan's work offers the first indisputable evidence of the validity of Indian English verse. Both The Striders ( 1966) and Relations (1971) are the heir of an anterior tradition, a tradition very much of this subcontinent, the deposits of which are in Kannada and Tamil, and which have been assimilated into English. Ramanujan's deepest roots are in the Tamil and Kannada past, and he has repossessed that past, in fact made it available, in the English language. I consider this a signrficantachievement . . . Ramanujan has successhlly
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conveyed in English what, at its subtlest and most incantational, is locked up in another linguistic tradition. He has. . . indicated the direction Indian English verse is likely to take in the future. 'Prayers to Lord Murugan', overlooked by Mishra, is . . . embedded in, and arises from, a specific tradition. It is . . . the first step towards esrablishing an indigenous tradition of Indian English verse. Both here and in his 1976 essay on Ramanujan, 'How It Strikes a Contemporary', the 'responsible critic' will find much that is vacuous, tautological, and ipse dixitish. The languages inherited by the multilingual Ramanujan may not conform to Parthasarathy's geological model. For the model to hold we have to agree that Ramanujan arranges Tamil and Kannada in the lower strata, English in the upper, and each time he chooses to write he descends, caged canary bird in hand, into the thickly-seamed coal pit ofthe mother tongue. Unless we know more about how languages are positioned in multilingual sensibilities-do they always keep this inflexible, stratified order?-and how writers relate to them, it is premature to dogmatize about the 'anterior tradition'. T h e phrase presents other difficulties. Does it mean that the Tamil and Kannada traditions are anterior per se, and the poet with access to their 'deposits' has an edge over those who do not? This is like saying that A.K. Ramanujan's pre-eminence as a poet lies solely in his being Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan of Mysore. In its context the phrase can also mean that Ramanujan's 'roots' in the subcontinent go deep because he spoke a native language first and learnt English subsequently (as if he was given a choice). Barring a few, most Indian English writers acquire the language they write in and seldom lick it off their mother's teats. Everyone equally inherits the tradition which is 'very much of this subcontinent', and everyone has access to its 'deposits' in the
The Emperor Has No Clothes
165
Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages. Ifsometimes the poet skips the ritual of offering a prayer to Lord Murugan or his collaterals, it does not follow that he stands disinherited.The whole question of multilingualism should be looked at less jingoistically if it is to have any meaning, as I think it does. We will remember that 'Prayers to Lord Murugan' is given as the example ofa poem which transfers to English what is 'embedded in, and arises from, a specific, tradition.' This is precisely what translations try and do and Ramanujan says as much in the translator's note to Speaking of Siva: ' I have tried t o . . . map the medieval Kannada onto the soun'd-look of modern English . . . The few liberties I have taken are towards a close structural mimicry, a re-enactment in English, the transposition of a structure in one texture onto another.' I therefore find it a little strange that when Parthasarathy talks about Ramanujan successfully conveying 'in English what, at its subtlest and most incantational, is locked up in another linguistic tradition', he does not have The Interior Landscape and Speaking of Siva in mind but The Striders and Relations. Should we not say that since poems written in English and translations from Dravidian languages, though done by the same person, are materially different, they ought to be read in different ways? O r did M.R. Satyanarayana's nonsensical statement that Kolatkar's Jejuri nowhere reads like a translation conceal an important truth? And has ParthaSarathy not done the same thing by describing Ramanujan's achievement as a poet in terms that are similar to those which Ramanujan employs to write about his aims as a translator? These questions are too arcane to be answered with any definiteness at present. Indeed, the line separating the Indian English poem as a weak act ofcultural transmission from one which is a work of art in its own right, a 'metatranslation', has never been so missed.
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The Emperor Has No Clothes
ParthaSarathyalso refers to 'Prayers to Lord Murugan' in 'How Strikes a contemporary'. Taking his ideas from a school head-
is so inept that even the idea of interlingual contact is thrown into doubt. He believes these languages are crucial to the work; he
master's uplifting speech, he says that the poem 'examines a tradition gone to seed, and invokes its relevance to our own times.' H e does not tell us anything about the tradition's functioning and how it went to seed, how the poem examines it, how the invocation takes place, and what its relevance 'to our own times' is. Instead, he doles out bits of information about Murugan's changing fortune: in the sixth century he is eclipsed by Vishnu and Siva; there is a revival of the cult a thousand years later. He approvingly quotes the poem's second section in which Murugan, in the tradition ofTamil heroic poetry, 'is vividly invoked'. He calls Ramanujan's tone 'bantering' and points out three paradoxes. H e concludes his account of the poem 'overlooked by Mishra' with the following sentence: 'Paradox is a form ofindirection, and indirection is a feature of poetic language.' (There are moments, and this is one of them, when Parthasarathy does not get even his platitudes right. Indirection is not a feature of 'poetic language'; it is a feature of language.) Parthasarathy has told us why he thinks Ramanujan is a significant poet. But since his method is fallacious-the thing to be examined (Ramanujan's 'roots' in Tamil and Kannada) is assumed in the premises (he is the heir of an 'anterior tradition')-we are still in the dark about Ramanujan's significance. Where should we look for it? What is the 'anterior tradition'? Where are the 'deposits'? How are they penetrated? Where is that miraculous
handles them like appendages. There are several reasons for this. The one role Murugan's par-
English poem conjoining these elements?Thesequestions become more persistent once we accept Parthasarathy's geological model.
colourful gods. Ramanujan's multilingualism therefore is so in-
His simple answer to them is 'Prayers to Lord Murugan'. Ask
the obvious signs. Once this is accepted we can further say that
him how and he hands you his circular argument. Parthasarathy's
if Ramanujan had written bucolics instead of vacanas and ended
treatment of the presence of Tamil and Kannada in Ramanujan
Relations with 'The Goatherd versus the Shepherd' instead of
ents did not train him for was to be a mould for Indian English poetry and so, given his physique, he wobbles away each time Parthasarathy tries to catch him. As I look at it, the poem on Murugan is a risky example to choose to show how Ramanuian's work connects with his native idiom: a reader like Parthasarathy will not think twice about making the figure of the Dravidian god its symbol. When Parthasarath? says the poem is embedded in another tradition which Ramanujan makes available to us; he is already reducing languages which are tissued in the multilingual sensibility to pictural shreds, to the framed surfaces of oleographs. The other tradition does not enter Indian English literature in the guise ofa god, a river, a place, a cow named Gopi, or aTipu Sultan; nor as a poetic shell: a rubai, a doha, a vacana, or an abhanga. Their presence alone does not reflect the inlay of, for instance, Tamil and Kannada in Ramanujan, and their absence will not mean that no inlaying has taken place. Ramanujan writes in the manner of Tamil heroic poetry, Adrienne Rich writes seventeen poems based on the ghazal, and American poets in Cedar Rapids write haikus by the score. Have they not taken their forms from a common pool? Is there any difference in the way non-English traditions operate in Ramanujan and Rich? There is none if we restrict Tamil and Kannada to being suppliers of poetic forms and laid in his work that in order to trace it we will have to look outside
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'Prayers to Lord Murugan', his 'deepest roots' would n o t have ceased to participate in the writing, but certainly their mode o f participation would be more difficult to plot. A note at the bottom o f page 57 of Relations describes Murugan as the 'Ancient Dravidian god o f fertility, joy, youth, beauty, war, and love. H e is represented as a six-faced god with rwelve hands.' Does one need t o know more? Perhaps o n e does and a scholar could profitably study the origins o f the 'cockfight a n d banner-/ dance' and the 'painted grey/ pottery' mentioned in the poem. It is, however, necessary to keep in mind that Kolatkar in Jejuri and Jayanta Mahapatra in A Rain o f Rites situate their work similarly in 'specific traditions', and I hope too m u c h fuss is not made about this aspect oftheir work since specificity is almost the first exercise in the book. To a poem the location-whether cultural, historical, geographical, or fictive-is everything: At Rochecoart, Where the hills part in three ways, And three valleys, full of winding roads, Fork out to south and north, There is a lace of trees . . . grey with lichen. I have walked there thinking of old days. At Chalais is a pleached arbour; Old pensioners and old ~rotectedwomen Have a right rhereit is charity. I have crept over old rafters, peering down Over the Dronne, over a stream full of lilies.
The Emperor Has No Clothes
I have gone in Ribeyrac and in Sarlat, I have climbed rickety stairs, heard talk of Croy, Walked over En Bertran's old layout, Have seen Narbonne, and Cahors and Chalus, Have seen Excideuil, carefully fashioned.
I have lain in Rocafixada, level with sunset, Have seen the copper come down , tingeing the mountains, I have seen the fields, pale, clear as an emerald, Sharp peaks, high spurs, distant castles.
That age is gone; Pieire de Maensac is gone. I have walked over these roads; I have thought of them living. (Ezra Pound, 'Provincia Deserta') The atlas has these qualities: it reveals the forms of cities that do notyet have a form or a name. There is a city in the shape ofAmsterdam, a semicirclefacing north, with concentriccanak- the princes: the emperors: the nobles) there is the city in the shape of York, set among the high moors, walled, bristling with towers; there is the city in the shape of New Amsterdam known also as New York, crammed with towers ofglass and steel on an oblong island between two rivers, with streets like deep canals, all of them straight, except Broadway.
(Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities) By going to a library the reader can i d e n t i b most references to myth a n d religion, folklore and history, in the poems of Ramanujan, Kolatkar, and M a h a ~ a t r aW . h a t the library cannot is
170
The Emperor Has No Clothes
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171
the English phrase . . . Is a good deal of Nabokov's English a piece of smuggling, an illicit conveyance across the frontier, of Russian verse now captive in a society he contemns?
the prismatic interlingual space in each poet. This space Parthahas filled with Murugan's torso. Multilingualism could well be the crux of Indian literature in English, particularly its poetry, b u t unless the perimeter around the space is cleared and w e know more about the deployment of Tamil-Kannada, Marathi,
We also require careful analysis of the local and literary background of Nabokov's English . . .
Oriya, a n d Russian in the English work of Ramanujan, KolatAll these would be preliminary lines of inquiry toward getting right the 'strangeness', the polysemic nature of Nabokov's use oflanguage[s]. They would clarify not only his prodigious talent, but such larger questions as the condition of multilingual imagining, of internalized translation, of the possible existence of a private mixed idiom 'beneath', 'coming before' the lo~alizationof different languages in the articulate brain.
kar, Mahapatra, a n d Nabokov respectively, we need to tread like angels. All the plums in Ramanujan's basket are found growing in Tamil a n d Kannada orchards; all are b u t nodules lying at the bottom of the Palk Straits. Pluck, dredge, and make it 'available' in English: is that all to the manual? I have attached Nabokov's name to the list because his position is analogous to ours and George Steiner, through his example,
Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett are the other 'new "es-
raises issues which are c o m m o n to multilingual writers:
perantists"' in Extraterritorial. T h o u g h Borges writes only in Spanish,
It would be by no means eccentric to read the major part ofNabokov's opus as a meditation-lyric, ironic, technical, parodistic-on the nature of human language, on the enigmatic coexistence of different, linguistically generated world visions and of a deep current underlying, and at moments obscurely conjoining, the multitude ofdiverse tongues. (Ex-traterritorial) I
W h e n Steiner moves away from subterraneity and looks specifically for the 'sources and fabric' of 'Nabokese'--the
!
Anglo-
(Ezra Pound has his place in this As it happens, these m~ltilin~uists context) are among the foremost writers of the age. The equation of a single pivot of language, of native deep-rootedness, with poetic authority is again in doubt.
American interlingua in which Nabokov wrote after his move to the United States in 1940-he
marks o u t an area a n d asks ques-
tions which we should be putting to Ramanujan, Kolatkar, and Mahapatra if we are to stay in the business as readers: We need really detailed study of the quality and degree of pressure which Russian puts on Nabokov's Anglo-American. How often are his English sentences 'meta-translations' of Russian? To what extent do Russian semantic associations initiate the images and contour of
His intimacy with French, German, and, particularly, with English is profound. Veryoften an English text-Blake, Stevenson, Coleridge, De Quincey-underlies the Spanish statement. The other language 'shines through', giving to Barges's verse and to his Fictions a quality of lightness, of universality. He uses the vulgate and mythology of Argentina to ballast what might otherwise be almost too abstract, too peregrine an imagination.
Borges, Steiner says in After Babel, moves among languages 'with a cat's sinewy confidence'. T h o u g h h e has a keen sense of the irreducible quality of each particular tongue, 'his linguistic experi1
ence is essentially simultaneous and, to use a Coleridgean notion,
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reticulative. Half a dozen languages and literatures interweave. B o y e s uses citations and literary historical references, often in-
The Emperor Has No Clothes towards the Indies, the antipodes. And you, always so ~erfectlysane.
vented, to establish the key, the singular locale of his verses
('Chicago Zen')
and fables.' Read, for its Borgesian inventiveness, the following sentence
VII
from the Acknowledgements page in Relations: 'Among m y conscious debts are a phrase from Vrinda Karandikar (page 22), o n e
T h e questions which should be asked: W h a t is a multilingual
from Pablo Neruda's prose (page 20), and an incident from a
sensibility? H o w d o languages tenant it? H o w does this tenancy
Kannada magazine story (page 5 1).'
register o n the poem? Steiner tries to answer these questions, but
T h e examples of Nabokov and Borges are enough to show that
even h e does not answer as m u c h as ask in Afier Babel. T h e area
the Indian English poem needs to be read in a radically different
is uncharted and all findings a r t tentative. Perhaps they will al-
way: not as a delectable slice of reality which the critic-and
ways be so.
sometimes Parthasarathy-applies
t o his nose, but as a place, a
construct, housing two o r more ways of seeing; four-eyed; Chang and Eng. Ramanujan emblematizes this in his recent work: Watch your step. Sight may strike you blind in unexpected places. The traffic light turns orange on 57th and Dorchester, and you stumble, you fall into a vision of forest fires, enter a frothing Himalayan river, rapid, silent. O n the 14th floor, Lake Michigan crawls and crawls in the window. Your thumbnail cracks a lobster louse on the window pane from your daughter's hair and you drown, eyes open,
Does a polyglot mentality operate differently from one that uses a single language or whose other languages have been acquired by subsequent learning? When a natively multilingual person speaks, do the languages not in momentary employ press upon the body of speech which he is actually articulating? Is there a discernible, perhaps measurable sense in which the options I exercise when uttering words and sentences in English are both enlarged and complicated by the 'surrounding presence or pressure' of French and German? If it truly exists, such tangential action might subvert my uses of English, making them in some degree unsteady, provisional, off-centre. This possibility may underlie the pseudo-scientific rumour that multilingual individuals or children reared simultaneously in 'too many' languages (is there a critical number?) are prone to schizophrenia and disorders of personality. O r might such 'interference' from other languages on the contrary render my use of any one language richer, more conscious of specificity and resource? Because alternative means lie so very near at hand, the speech forms used may be more animate with will and deliberate focus. In short: does that 'intertraffique of the minde,' for which Samuel Daniel raised John Florio, the great translator, inhibit or augment the faculty of expressive utterance? That it must have marked influence is certain.
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The Emperor Has No Clothes
175
Parthasarathy has implied one way in which languages tenant
can devise a heuristic model to show the interplay of languages i n
a polyglot's brain: they are kept in layers and the relationship
the central nervous system. In Hinduism the 'great' tradition is
between them is that between source-language (Tamil-Kannada)
Vedic, whereas the 'little' is woven from 'saints' legends, minor
and receptor-language (English). "'Layers" is', says Steiner, 'of
mythologies, systems of magic and superstition . . . local animal
course, a piece of crass shorthand. It may mean nothing. T h e spa-
sacrifices . . . wakes, vigils, fairs
tial organization, contiguities, insulations, synaptic branchings
roads and rivers.' In the context of Indian English poetry, the
between, which account for the arrangement ofdifferent languages
'great' tradition would be English and the 'little' revolve around
in the brain of the polyglot, and especially of the native bilingual,
the native idiom. Ramanujan has described how the two tradi-
must be of an order of topological intricacy beyond any we can
tions coexist within the structure of Hinduism:
picture' (After Babel). There are several other ways in which languages can be arranged and each arrangement will affect the interlingual relationship. In other words, one could provide the field with new metaphors: languages as sources of light, attended by eclipses and penumbral zones; languages as lightning conductors, earthing each other's electric storms; languages as geological faults, sending mild tremors through each other; languages as conjugate mirrors. Since languages are motile, no single metaphor or cluster of metaphors is final. [N]o topologies of n-dimensional spaces, no mathematical theories of knots, rings, lattices, or closed or open curvatures, no algebra of matrices can until now authorize even the most ~ r e l i m i n a model r~ of the 'language-spaces'in the central nervous system . . . The membranes of differentiation and of contact, the dynamics of interlingual osmosis, the constraints which preserve equilibrium between the blandness of mere lexical, public usage and the potentially chaotic prodigality of private invention and association, the speed and delicacy of retrieval and of discard involved in even the barest act of paraphrase or translation . . . of [these] we can, at present, offer no adequate image let alone systematic analysis. (Af2erBabel)
. . . worship of stone, trees, cross-
. . . traditions are not divided by impermeable membranes; they interflow into one another, responsive to differences of density as in an osmosis. It is often difficult to isolate elements as belonging exclusively to the one or the other. A Sanskrit epic like the Mahabharata contains in its encyclopedic range much folk material, like tales, beliefs, proverbs, picked obviously from folk sources, refurbished, Sanskritized, fixed forever in the Sanskritic artifice of eternity. But in a profoundly oral culture like the Indian, the Sanskrit Mahabharata itself gets returned to the oral folk-traditions, contributing the transformed materials back to the 'little' traditions to be further diffused and diffracted. It gets 'translated' from the Sanskrit into the regional languages; in the course of the 'translations', the regional poet infuses it with his rich local traditions . . . Thus many cycles of give-and-take are set in motion. Though Ramanujan and Steiner are discussing subjects as dissimilar as Hinduism and multilingual imagining, both use osmosis as a metaphor to describe their inner workings. If what Steiner says about the reticular nature of Nabokov's and Borges's linguistic experience is correct, then languages have porosity just as religious traditions do, the 'great' and the 'little' are 'not divided
Following the anthropologist's division of establishment
by impermeable membranes' in either. The native idiom (the
Hinduism into 'great' and 'little' traditions and Ramanujan's des-
'little') has to seep through the English poem (the 'great'); how
cription of the terms in his introduction to Speaking of S'zua, we
could it not? And if this is so, then each poet writes in an idiolect
176
The Emperor Has No Clothes
Partial Recall
as distinctive as 'Nabokese': Ramanujan's consists of English~ a n n a d a - T a m i l ,Kolatkar's of English-Marathi-Bombay Hindi, Mahapatra's of English-Oriya, and so on. Each poet belongs to a tribe of one or two, seldom more than of six or eight, and Indian English literature becomes a dream dreamt outside the several bodies of these phenomena. It is the dream of Gondwanaland.
177
from their suppressors who were also their neighbours. But Hinduism from the start is an alloy of the Brahmanic tradition and the many other and older Indian traditions. Due to [his long process of osmosis, tribal art in India, on the whole, lacks stylistic certitude and perfectedness of the tribal art of Africa, Oceania, and of the American Indian. Between Nabokov's English and Russian, between Borges's Spanish
T h e osmotic process ofthe multilingual common factor explain
and English, between Ramanujan's English and Tamil-Kannada,
Indian English literature's mottled look and its incohesiveness: for
between the pan-Indian Sanskritic tradition and folk material,
this reason we can hardly speak of Indian English literature as
and between the Bharut Stupa and G o n d carvings 'many cycles of
we d o of Bengali or French. W h a t I call mqttled look has a parallel
give-and-take are set in motion'. T h e Buddhist stone railings are
in India's tribal art. T h e latter, according to~StellaKramrisch, lacks
imprinted with tribal motifs; th; tribe, in its turn, assimilates the
'stylistic certitude', and her insight is based o n the recognition of
culture of its suppressor: it is the 'geat' tradition getting 'translated'
osmosis in Hinduism and its percolations into adjoining forms.
into the regional language. Nabokov's 'Russian version of Alice
Though there can be few outward resemblances between Hinduism
in Wonderland (Berlin, 1923)', writes Steiner, 'has long been re-
and Indian English literature, there is at least one between India
cognized as one of the keys to the whole Nabokovian oeuvre'
English literature and India's tribal art. T h e model I have pro-
(Extraterritorial).
posed for the 'dynamics of interlingual osmosis' is supplemented by what Kramrisch writes in Unknown India: Tribal art throughout India for the last two thousand years at least must be assumed to have coexisted with traditions commanding greater means and more complex organization. The Buddhist stone railings of the stupa of Bharut and the Stupa of the Saints, in Sanchi, both collective monuments of sculpture of the second to first century BC, show the work of many different hands. These stone railings with their carvings are each a symposium of styles, some of which bear affinity to tribal carvings such as those of the Gond who to this day live not far from the sites of these ancient monuments. Buddhism was open to members of any group. The sculptors, however, were not necessarily Buddhists, they were from the lower Hindu strata of ancient Indian or tribal stock. Progressing Hinduization, while dissolving much of the self-supporting and self-sufficient tribal communities, absorbed as much as it destroyed of tribal traditions while these tribes, where they survived as solid groups, assimilated much
There is another aspect to the model. W h e n Ramanujan says that traditions in Hinduism interflow into one another 'as in an osmosis', he is referring, obliquely, to an analogous structure: his poems. His statement quoted in Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets is explicit: English and my disciplines (linguistics, anthropology) g'Ive me my 'outer' forms-linguistic, metrical, logical and other such ways of shaping experience; and my first thirty years in India, my frequent visits and fieldtrips, my personal and professional preoccupations with Kannada, Tamil, the classics and folklore give me my substance, my 'inner' forms, images and symbols. They are continuous with each other, and I no longer can tell what comes from where. T h e semicolon in the first sentence is the osmotic membrane; the binaries of 'great'l'little' are substituted by 'outer'l'inner'; in Hinduism 'It is often difficult to isolate elements as belonging
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The Emperor Has No Clothes
exclusively to the one or the other'; in his poems 'They are con-
early to say how or where, the other language is the torsional force
tinuous with each other, and I n o longer can tell what comes
in their work in the same way that Russian presses o n 'Nabo-
from where.'
kese' a n d non-native French, German, and English glow beneath
Ramanujan is not without the necessary cunning. T h e answer to the third question, 'how d o the "language-
Barges's Spanish. Indian English literature belongs with the work of these 'new "e~~erantists"'.
spacesn register o n the poem?' is dependent o n h o w we answer the
VIII
first two. I f a multilingual sensibility is a riverbed where languages deposit their silt and the 'spaces' are stratified, they will register o n the poem but marginally. O n the other hand if we look o n the sensibilityas a crucible in which languages change theirproperties, the effect is molecular. To Nabokov's sentences they give an intri-
179
. . . words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are. For this reason the misuse oflanguage . . . destroys our authentic relation to things.Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics
cacy not elsewhere found in English prose; to Borges's what Words are not a medium in which to copy life. Their true work is to restore life itself to order.--I.A. hchards, Philosophy of Rhetoric
Alastair Reid calls 'a mysterious balance': At a time when the validity of literature is often in question, Borges reads and writes as one who has no doubt at all of the power of words to illumine and disquiet. I always think of him occupying that netherworld of the translator and the bilingual, backstage in the great silence behind language, taking his careful daily walk from the silence to the word, to the sentence, to the book, to the library, and back again. I think what we are most grateful for in Borges's work is that from such disparate elements, such diverse reading, such multilingual experience, he has found a focal point, a mysterious balance, an equilibrium in a way that we, his readers, no longer thought possible in books. ('Borges as Reader') In brief: for various phrenetical reasons-among
them a suspi-
cion that Ramanujan has been carried away by a pack of Oriya
werewolves-Parthasarathy wrecks the axiom that links exist between Ramanujan's English poems and his native languages. Parthasarathy need not have repeated this four times in the same letter. Moreover, the axiom, as he paragraph of his Chandrabh* understands it, has nothing to d o with Ramanujan's significance. Most Indian English poets are bilingual and, though it is too
Parthasarathy stands the epigraphs above o n their heads when he says in his introduction to Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets that there are two problems the Indian English writer must comes to terms with: The first is the quality of experience he would like to express in English. The Indian who uses the English language feels, to some extent, alienated. His development as a poet is sporadic. And it is partly because of this that there is, today, no perspective at all in which to of the idiom he evaluate this phenomenon. The second is the uses. There has always been a time-lag between the living, creative idiom of English-speaking peoples and the English used in India. And this time-lag is not likely to diminish, although it has today considerably narrowed down. It should be kept in mind that Parthasarathy is not here talking about the modernist crisis: the inward collapse of words, the fragments ofspeech, the crowded subway oflanguage that everyone rides. ' T h e poet's language,' writes Valery, 'constitutes . . . an effort by one man to create an artificial a n d ideal order by means
180
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of a material ofvulgar origin.' A haunting description of the crisis is Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos' Letter: For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back-whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void. In Parthasarathy's account the Indian English writer, w h o seems to have fallen off the footboard of twentieth century literature, faces a singular difficulty. T h e quality of his experience as an Indian-whatever that is-and the language in which he is fated to express himself d o not fit. T h e problem-alienationwill presumably disappear if the poet removes English and wears his native idiom. Kolatkar, by this reasoning, is wasting his time fashioning Kolatkarese when h e has the other cupboard stacked with Marathi ready-mades. Buridan's ass was given a choice to eat from two equal bales of hay situated at equal distances from him, but being unable to decide between the two equally balanced alternatives, h e chose t o starve himself to death. Kolatkar and Ramanujan are better off. T h e bales o f Marathi and Tamil are so much nearer than the straws o f English. Why, then, are they giving u p an uninterrupted poetic development for one that is 'sporadic'? A n d why should they occasionally choose to strut about in ill-shapen trousers when they can, instead, dress their experience in flowing robes? T h e problem of finding the right garments for the tailor's d u m m y of course does not exist. O n the night of 18-1 9 February 1 9 1 3 Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer:
I am not of the opinion that one can ever lack the power to express perfectly what one wants to write or say. Observations on the weakness of language, and comparisons between the limitations of words and
The Emperor Has No Clothes
1 81
the infinity of feelings, are quite fallacious. The infinite feeling continues to be as infinite in words as it was in the heart. What is clear within is bound to become so in words as well. This is why one need never worry about language, but at sight of words may often worry about oneself. After all, who knows within himself how things really are with him? This tempestuous or floundering or morass-like inner self is what we really are, but by the secret process by which words are forced out of us, our self-knowledge is brought to light, and though it may still be veiled, yet it is there before us, wonderful or terrible to behold. (Lettersto Felice) Kafka's confidence in words was short-lived (who could have sustained it?) and within a montL he was writing to the same correspondent: . . . hardly a word comes to me from the fundamental source, but is
seized upon fortuitously and with great difficulty somewhere along the way. When I was in the swing ofwriting and living, I once wrote to you that no true feeling need search for corresponding words, but is confronted or even impelled by them. Perhaps this is not quite true, after all. O n e has to bring Parthasarathy's problem alongside Kafka's crisis to see how puerile it is. There are some moments when the writer has all the garments for the dummy; there are others when he has none at all. Some mornings, language-the bale of hayis responsive to 'the swing ofwriting and living'; o n others, words have to be 'seized upon fortuitously' and the hay has disappeared. Kafka's father, incidentally, grew up a Czech, never quite mastering written German, and his son was aware that he too was a foreigner to the language. Three years before he died, in a letter to Max Brod, Kafka likened German to 'foreign capital' which had not been earned but 'boisterously or secretively or even masochistically' appropriated. 'This accounts', Eric Heller says, 'at least
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The Emperor Has No Clothes
partially for Kafka's unending scruples about publishing what he wrote. But sometimes he was confident that he had succeeded
A little before Lord Chandos came on the scene, Rimbaud,
182
in hammering out that "most personal" German style that was truly alive.' HofmannsthaI, Valery, and Kafka-and
indeed several others-
realized that language, the sensitive plant, had withered. In extreme cases the writer, like Lord Chandos, felt that words had crumbled in his mouth 'like mouldy fungi'. T h e sensation that words sometimes fail to embody the quality-the
'what-ness'-
183
looking under the disintegration, said, Old tricks of poetry played a large part in my alchemy of [he word.
I became habituated to simple hallucination: I clearly saw a mosque in place of a gasworks, a school of drummers composed of angels, open carriages on [he roads of heaven, a drawing room ar the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; a title from light comedy would raise terrors before me. (A Season in Hell)
of individual experience cuts across languages. 'There can',
(Remember that festooned waiters hung from blue police chowkis
Steiner writes,
in Lear's 'Indian' poem.) Later, Louis Aragon will draw his inspiration from the same alchemical fount: 'Life is a language; writing
hardly be an awakened human being who has not, at some point, been exasperated by the 'publicity' of language, who has not experienced an almost bodily discomfort at the disparity between the uniqueness, the novelty of his own emotions and the worn coinage of words . . . The secret jargon of the adolescent coterie, the conspirator's password, the nonsense diction of lovers, teddybear talk are fitful short-lived ripostes to the binding commonness and sclerosis of speech. (Ajer Ba6eI) To the list of short-lived ripostes, add Edward Lear's ' T h e Cummerbund': She sate upon her Dobie, To watch the Evening Star, And all the Punkahs as they passed Cried, 'My! How fair you are!' Around her bower, with quivering leaves, The tall Kamsamahs grew, And Kitmutgars in wild festoons Hung down from Tchokis blue. W h e n the curtain lifts on the modern period we are witnessing the spectacle of this breach o f contract between word and world.
is a completely different one'; and Eugene Jolas's transition will publish ' T h e Revolution of the Word': ' T h e writer expresses. H e does not communicate. T h e plain reader be damned.' 'Hence the desire', writes Renato Poggioli, 'to create new languages', attempts like that of young Stephan George or old James Joyce, or the Russian poet Velimir Chlebnikov throughout his career. Each man constructed his own artificial and private idiom, conventional and arbitrary, based on onomatopoeic and etymological criteria, on the suggestiveness of ambiguity and equivocation . . . Such a search for new languages . . . is perhaps the most striking inheritance left to modern poetry by French symbolism and its numerous offshoots in Europe and America. (The Theory of the Avant-Garde) ' T h e lacking word' and its aftermath is a rubric and Parthasarathy should have noticed it. T h e backstage chatter is loud enough to be heard: The principal division in the history of Western literature occurs between the early 1870s and the turn of the century. It divides a literature essentially housed in language from one for which language has become a prison.
184
The Emperor Has No Clothes
Partial Recall
T h e poet no longer has or aspires to native tenure in the house of words. T h e languages waiting for him as an individual born into history, into society, into the expressive conventions of his particular culture and milieu, are no longer a natural skin. Established language is the enemy.
185
Parthasarathy begins 'Homecoming', the third part of Rough
Passage, by saying My tongue in English chains, I return, after a generation, to you. I am at the end
A modern poem is an active contemplation of the impossibilities or near impossibilities of adequate 'coming into being'. T h e poetry of modernism is a matter of structured debris: from it we are made to envision, to hear the poem that might have been, the poem that will be if, when, the word is made new. (Aftpr Babet)
The rift is between language and experience rather than between a particular language and, in Parthasarathy's thoughtful phrase, 'everyday Indian reality'. T h e rift, moreover, does not vary from place to place: wide here, narrow there. So let us not say that the development of the Indian English poet is 'sporadic' because he is down with a mild attack of alienation complicated by 'time-lag'. English is his 'foreign capital' and it is up to him to steal it and hammer out that 'most personal' style. In this he can either suc-
of my dravidic tether, hunger for you unassuaged. I falter, stumble. Speak a tired language ('Homecoming 1')'
and in the following section writes: To live in Tamil Nadu is to be conscious every day of impotence. There is the language, for instance:
ceed or fail. Am I also to believe that had ParthaSarathy and Shiv
the bull Nammalvar took by the horns, is today an pnrecognizable carcass, quick with the fleas of Kodambakkam.
K. Kumar written in their mother tongues, Tamil and Punjabi
('Homecoming 2')
respectively, their contributions to those literatures would have been any more remarkable?
The tongue in chains; a tired language; language as a bull's carcass. For different reasons, generations of poets have felt these faded metaphors but, so far as I know, no one has quite left it at that. T h e tongue in chains, or something like it, inheres in the
To write, as Flaubert and Goncourt understood it, is to exist, to be one's self. To have a style is to speak. in the midst of a common language, a particular dialect, unique and inimitable, yet so constituted as to be at once the language of all and the language of an individual . . . If a man did not have style as a means of achieving variety, everything would be said in the first hundred years of a literature.Remy d e Gourmont, Decadence and Other Essays
modernist poem; it is not flogged as the poem itself. From another perspective, ParthaSarathy's metaphors are the formulaic counterpart of Homer's rosy-fingered Dawn. To heroic poetry, representative descriptions and stock incidents were indispensable. AS the bard intoned them, or repeated messages word for word, he prepared the next episode while the audience readied itself to
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The Emperor Has No Clothes
listen to him. This was the interval. In The World of Odysseus, M.1. Finley points out that the incidents and formulas which the
wine-dark sea. T h e sea is all seas and in the Odyssey it does not call
professional bard inherited served as his raw material, his build-
sarathy's night too is all nights, but far from being a rivet it is
ing blocks. '[Elach work-each performance, in other words-is a new one, though all the elements may be old and well known.'
meant to be the ~ o e m ' smainspring.
But imagine the restiveness of Homer's audience had everything
Athene.
186
187
attention to itself; it's merely a screw in a large machine. Partha-
And who corresponds to Ravi Shankar in Homer? Grey-eyed
been left out of the Odyssey except 'the coming of dawn and of
As if summing up my quarrel with Rough Passage, the blurb
the night, scenes of combat and burial and feasting, the ordinary
to the book says that Parthasarathy 'has the imagination and the
activitiesofmen-arising
words to enclose an image totally in its universal as well as natural
and eating and drinking and dreaming-
.
descriptions of palaces and meadows, arms and treasure, metaphors
context.' A counterview to this would be Goethe's statement that
of the sea or of pasturage, and so on beyond enumeration.' This
Randall Jarrell quotes in 'Reflections on Wallace Stevens':
is precisely what Parthasarathy does in Rough Passage. In place of a specific chain-mark on his tongue, he presents a list of raw materials for a poem. Divided in three sections ('Exile', 'Trial', and 'Homecoming') and spun out in three-line stanzas, it contains 'formulas that could fit any incident'. Parthasarathy's linguistic crisis in 'Homecoming' lacks what
It makes a great difference whether the poet seeks the particular in relation to the universal or contemplates the universal in the particular . . . [In the first case] the particular functions as an example, as an instance of the universal; but the second indeed represents the very nature of poetry. He who grasps this articular as living essence also encompasses the universal.
Gourrnont called 'style'. In 'Exile', the poem's first section, the building blocks are even bigger: In a basement flat, conversation filled the night, while Ravi Shankar, cigarette stubs, empty bottles of stout and crisps provided the necessary pauses. He had spent his youth whoring After English gods. There is something to be said for exile: you learn roots are deep. ('Exile 2') This is not any evening of smoking and drinking and eating but the defining night of Parthasarathy's sojourn, expressed formulaically. In Homer, the corresponding formula would be the
T h e Parthasarathian particular, seldom more particular than the tongue in English chains or whoring after English gods, is an instance of the Parthasarathian universal: the fate of Englisheducated Tamil Brahmins (which is how the O U P catalogue describes him); the 'inner conflict' ofeveryone who has been 'brought up in two cultures' (which is from the blurb); the fate of the Indian English writer; the fate of the Orientalist's Oriental. Things are otherwise. T h e poet grasps 'the particular as living essence' and leaves the universal well alone. T h e tactive gesture underlies all poems and, in a modest way, all riddles: Two bodies have I Though both joined in one, The stiller I stand The faster I run.
188
Partial Recall
T h e riddle-maker must have possessed an hourglass. Goethe's 'particular'; Hopkins's 'inscape' ('AH the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as a purpose: looking out of my window I caught it in the random clods and broken heaps of snow made by the cast of a broom.'); Rilke's 'Things' ('If can manage it, return with a portion of your weaned and grown-up feeling to any one of the things of your childhood with which you were much occupied . . . Was it not with aThing that you first shared your little heart, like a piece of bread that had to suffice for two?'); Walter Benjamin's 'aura' ('If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, that branch.') There is only one axis and these testaments are points on it. At bottom, poetry is perception's flame burning in a thousand votive lamps. A sixth-century Greek pottery lamp in the Hermitage bears the words 'I am a lamp and I shine for gods and men'. ParthaSarathy extinguishes it. When he wakes up from the dark night of exile, this is what his rosy-fingered Dawn looks like: The noises reappear of early trains, the milkman, and the events of the day become vocal in the newsboy. ('Exile 2') Four lines is a lot of lines. Pound needed half their number to record his impression of a crowd in a station of the Metro. In 'The Whitsun Weddings', Philip Larkin approaches the city Parthasarathy is about to leave, and had Parthasarathy not exhausted himself chasing after i~niversals,he too might have 'thought of
The Emperor Has No Clothej
189
London spread out in the sun,/ Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat.' T h e faces at La Concorde that caught Pound's eye and Larkin seeing London from a train that Saturday afternoon: moments detached from time and placed across its channel. (Literature as counterforce affecting the reader's pulse.) You cannot step into the same river twice, but you might succeed in taking away something from it. Poetic seeing is akin to lock picking, and art receives sight's stolen goods. ' [ l l h e greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. . . . To see clearly is poetfy, prophecy, and religion, all in one' (John Ruskin, Modern Painters). 'What you look hard at', Hopkins says in the Notebooks, 'seems to look hard at you.' Parthasarathy's faceless metropolis takes after his faceless exile. Only someone so averse to seeing and listening could have written 'coloureds' is what they call us over there-the city is no jewel, either: lanes full of smoke and litter, with puddles of unwashed English children. ('Exile 2') or made an old man say on New Year's Eve An empire's last words are heard on the hot sands of Africa. The da Gamas, Clives, Dupleixs are back. 'Exile 2')
190
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The Emperor Has No Clothes
191
From the death cells in sight of M t Taishan, Pound remember-
Pound hears words ('Yurra Jurrmun!'), not ideas; and sees
ed. In Canto 83 it is Stone Cottage and Uncle William (which is
luminous details ('the gulls be as neat'). Compare this with
W.B. Yeats)
'"coloureds" is what they call us' and the old man's stagy recital. The difference between them is the difference between particu-
who would not eat ham for dinner because peasants eat ham for dinner despite the excellent quality and the pleasure of having it hot. . .
lars and universals, poetry and poppycock, an ant from a broken anthill and a stuffed owl. I have drawn attention to two exiles, two Londons, and two homecomings for another reason: in the hope that someone will
In Canto 80 it is a brief encounter in a London street:
look into all the implications of the following declaration:
and a navvy rolls up to me in Church St. (Kensington End) with Yurra Jurrmun! To which I replied: I am not. 'Well yurr szum kind ov a furriner.'
English being a foreign language, the words are not burdened with irrelevant associations for the poet. They are invariably ordinary and inconspicuous; rarely, if ever, reverberant. And herein lies their strength. There is something clinical about Ramanujan's use of language. It has a cold, glass-like quality. It is an attempt to turn language into an artifact.-(R. Parthasarathy, Introduction to Ten TwentiethCentury Indian Poets)
-
The incident took place in 1914-15, and the navvy is justly suspicious of the 'furriner' going about in a velvet coat and red tie. Pound writes towards the end of the Canto:
In effect, the Indian English poet, missing out on the 'landscapes and the Serpentine will look just the same and the gulls be as neat on the pond and the sunken garden unchanged and God knows what else is left of our London my London, your London When Pound remembered the gulls on the Round Pond he was
of experience, the fields of idiomatic, symbolic, communal reference which give to language its specific gravity' (AfZerBabel), uses what I.A. Richards has called 'English of some sort', Parthasarathy's 'words . . . not burdened with irrelevant associations', which 1
Steiner likens to 'a thin wash, marvelously fluid, but without adequate base. One need only converse with Japanese colleagues
locked up in an outdoor cage, measuring six feet by six and a half,
and students, whose technical proficiency in English humbles
in the Detention Training Center, a place described by the guards
one, to realize how profound are the effects of dislocation. So
as 'the arse hole of the army'. It lay north of Pisa. A few months
much that is being said is correct, so little is right.' Is it because
later, in November 1945, Pound's exile came to an end; he was
of this thin wash, which Professor Steiner's Japanese students
transferred to Chestnut Ward, St Elizabeth's Hospital for the
also possess, that Ramanujan's poems have a glass-like quality?
Criminally Insane, Washington, DC. Robert Frost, later to claim
Parthasarathy had earlier, in similar fashion, trivialized 'Prayers to
credit for Pound's release, said to Richard Wilbur, 'To hell with
Lord Murugan'. He ~ e r f o r m sthe same feat again by confusing
him, he's where he belongs.' He lived there for the next twelve
artificial language with linguistic artifact, and through a habitual
years; it was a sort of homecoming.
use of non sequiturs.
192
Partial Recall X
Diversity is as abundant as all the tones of voice, as all the various manners of walking, coughing, blowing the nose, sneezing. Among fruits we distinguish grapes, among grapes the muscat, among muscats first the Condrieu variety, then the Desargues, then the particular stock. But is this all? Has a vine ever produced two bunches alike, or a bunch two similar grapes?
I have never judged anything twice in exactly the same way. A town, a landscape are when seen from afar a town and landscape; but as one gets nearer, there are houses, trees, tiles, leaves, grasses, ants, legs of ants, and so on to infinity. All is contained under the name of landscape.
The Emperor Has No Clothes I am through with the city. No better than ghettos, the suburbs. ('Exile 5') What have I come here for from a thousand miles? The sky is no different. e . clubs Beggars are the same e ~ e r ~ w h e rThe are there, complete with bar and golf-links. ('Exile 7')
.
'All men', said Confucius, 'eat and drink; few distinguish the flavours.' Wandering among London's crowds-among
'puddles of
unwashed1 English children1-Wordsworth So runs a vision of things; it is Pascal's. Confronting it is the purblind one; it gives us, apart from pronouncements a n d threats, the cardboard cities of Rough Passage: It was always evening when we entered a city. Empty streets, perhaps a drizzle or, as in Asia, dust and famished children stopped us.
The streets are noisy, and trees on Malabar Hill blind with dust. Spring had gone unnoticed . . .
was smitten Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare) O f a blind Beggar, who, with upright face, Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest Wearing a written paper to explain His story, whence he came, and who he was. Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round As with the might of waters; an apt type This label seemed of the utmost we can know, Both of ourselves and of the universe . . . ( Tile Prelude [1850], Book VII)
Wordsworth gazed 'on the shape ofthat unmoving man,/ His steadfast face and sightless eyes
('Exile 3') The city reels under the heavy load of smoke. Its rickety legs break wind . . .
. . .I As ifadmonished from another world.' But
if we go to language with a pickaxe and wicker basket, the result is A grey sky oppresses the eyes: porters, rickshaw-pullers, barbers, hawkers, fortune-tellers, loungers compose the scene. ('Exile 8')
194
Partial Recall
This rubble exemplifies one kind of Indian English poetry. Rough Passage is an anonymous quarrier's grave. Postscript
In sections V, VI and VII of this essay I have not questioned the assumption that, whatever its fallacies, Parthasarathy's letter to Chandrabh* was an honest response to Rabi S. Mishra's essay
A.K. Ramanujan: A Point of View'. Working from Parthasarathy's response, I have tried to bring the Indian poem in English closer to what I felt was its first home: multilingual imagining. In course of time the interplay of languages-of outlooks-in these Indian poems will be better understood. I would not have been able to write the essay in quite the way I have had I pointed out at the start that key phrases in the two sentences which gave me so much trouble in Parthasarathy's letterBoth The Striders (1966) and Relations (1971) are the heir of an anterior rradition, a tradition very much of this subcontinent, the deposits of which are in Kannada and Tamil, and which have been assimilated into English.
and Ramanujan has successfully conveyed in English what, ar its subtlest and most incantational, is locked up in another linguistic tradition.
-were
plagiarisms. Instead ofwriting those sections I would then
have written a one-line dismissal and called ParthaSarathy an old knave, after which there would have been nothing more to add. The key phrases in the two sentences are purloined from David Jones's essay 'On the Difficulties of O n e Writer of Welsh Affinity
The Emperor Has No Clothes
195
Whose Language is English' in The Dying Gauland Other Writings (London, 1978), pp. 30-4. Literature had its plagiarist on the grand scale in Coleridge but this is petty larceny. That it should already be so much a part of a literature so young cannot bring much joy-or hope.
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
19 7
from the native states. British domination eventually covered all aspects of lndian life-political,
economic, social, cultural. T h e
introduction of English into the complex, hierarchical language
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
system of India has proved the most enduring aspect of this domination. By 1800 the battles of Plassey (1 757) and Buxar ( 1 764) were fought and lost. Siraj-ud-Daula's defeat at Plassey was less at the hands of Col. Robert Clive than at those of the compradors of
Hindoostan, has by the people of modern Europe, been understood to mean the tract situated between the river Ganges and Indus, on the east and west; the Thibetian and Tartarian mountains, on the north; and the sea on the south.-Major James Rennell, Introduction to AZemoir ofu Mup ofHindoostan; O K the Mogul? Empire (1786) The expression 'Indid shall mean British India, together with any territories of any native prince or chief under the suzerainty of Her Majesty, exercized under the Governor-General, or through anp.Governor or other officer subordinate to the Governor-General of India. -Interpretation Act of 1889
. . . the State of Chhokrapur, if indeed it ever existed, has dissolved away in the new map of India. -1.R. 2nd edn of Hindoo Holiday (1952)
Ackerley, Preface to the
An Illustrated History of lndia~zLiterature in English (New Llelhi: Permanent Black, 2003), a volume which covers almost two hundred years of the literature written largely by Indians in English, has for its starting point the year 1800. T h e date has no literarysignificance but is chosen for its rough and ready usefulness: by 1800 there was no real challenge left to the British domination of India from either the other European powers in the region-the Dutch, French, and Portuguese-nor, except for the Marathas,
Bengal, the Jagat Seths. Seeing their profit margins reduced by Mughal impositions o n their commerce, these wealthy H i n d u and lain merchants and bankers, fogether with powerful members of the nawab's court, plotted his overthrow, a conspiracy in which the East India Company joined. Militarily the battle was not more than a skirmish; according to one estimate there were only seventy-two dead after counting the figures o n both sides, but as Joshua Marshman wrote in his influential Bharatvarsher Itihas
( I 831), it 'changed the destinies of sixty million people in a vast kingdom'. Among those whose destiny it affected was Dean Mahomed
( 1 759-1 8 5 l), the author of The TrtLveLsofDean Mahomet (1794), the first book ever written and published by an Indian in English. Born in Patna into a family that had traditionally served the Mughal empire, he joined, as had his father and brother before him, the East IndiaCompany's Bengal Army in 1769 and travelled with it as a camp follower and subaltern officer for the next fifteen years, going as far north as Delhi. His book, in the form of a series of letters to a fictive friend, is in large measure based o n his experiences in the colonial army. In 1784 he emigrated to Ireland, settling down in Cork and marrying a young local Anglo-lrish woman. H e also converted to the Protestant faith. In later life, after unsuccessfully running the Hindostanee Coffee House near
198
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
Partial Recall
Portman Square, London, he set himself up as a 'Shampooing Surgeon' in Brighton, where his herbal 'Indian Vapour Bath' was immediately popular and attracted the patronage of King George
199
received 'the Duanney' in his tent. Two of the six Englishmen in the picture were not present with him in Allahabad on that day, and the emperor's throne, far from being a canopied, oriental
Plassey effectively brought Bengal under Company rule and,
affair, was in fact Clive's dining table surmounted by an armchair. At about the time Shah Alam was being reduced to a piece of
following Mir Qasim's defeat, Buxar added the contiguous terri-
rococo furniture, Captain James Rennell, who had already spent
tory of Avadh to the areas already under British influence. The Company now controlled the eastern Gangetic plain from Benares
five years in the country and carried out extensive surveys of the coastal areas of southern India, was appointed by Clive as the
to Calcutta. In the following year, 1765, the Mughal emperor appointed the East India Company his diwan (or chief financial
first Surveyor-General of Bengal. The Bengal Atlas that Rennell brought out in 1779, the culmination of more than a decade's
manager) of the provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, thereby
effort, was the first modern atlasof the province. As more colo-
enabling it to collect revenue on his behalf Known as the Treaty ofAllahabad, this arrangement has been called 'the truly inaugural
nial administrators realized the importance of cartography to empire building, Rennell's pioneering effort was duplicated in
moment of the Raj'. The Company's accession to diwani, Ranajit
other British-controlled Indian territories, notably by Captain
Guha says in An Indian Historiography of India (1988)) 'brought together in one single instance all the three fundamental aspects
Colin Mackenzie in the Deccan, and by him and Major William Lambton, after the fall ofTipu Sultan in 1799, in Mysore. Corres-
of colonialism in our subcontinent, namely, its origin in an act of
ponding with the labours of these soldier-engineers, the British
force, its exploitation of the primary produce of the land as the very basis of a colonial economy, and its need to give force and
set about mapping the intellectual, cultural, and historical dimen-
exploitation the appearance of legality.'
and translation were some of the areas opened up by Sir Charles
There is to this inaugural moment of the Raj, as there was sometimes to the Raj itself, a touch of farce. When, thirty years
Wilkins, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Sir William !ones, John
IV who, in 1822, bestowed a Royal Warrant upon him.
later, the painter Benjamin West depicted the treaty-lord
Clive
sions oftheir new territories. Comparative philology, lexicography,
Gilchrist, and Henry Colebrooke, all of whom are now remembered as pioneering 'Orientalists'.
receivingf;orn the Moghul the Grant of the Duannephe showed
The British interest in Indian languages, as Halhed bluntly
the Mughal emperor Shah Alam in an imperial setting, seated
said, arose from the necessity of having to cultivate 'a medium of
under a canopy on a raised throne, from where he hands Clive a rolled document. There are elephants in the background and in
intercourse between the Government and its subjects, between the natives of Europe who are to rule, and the inhabitants of India
the foreground attendants. Clive's party, consisting of six Englishmen, is shown on the left of the canvas. Some of the Eng-
who are to obey.' But the scholar-administrators who busied
lishmen appear to be talking in whispers to each other, as do some
not always patronizing in their attitude, nor did they put their newly acquired skills always to imperialist uses. Even Halhed,
of the Indians. The reality was quite different: Clive actually
themselves with Persian and Sanskrit, 'Moors' and Bengali, were
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Towards a History o f Indian Literature o f English
who wrote and printed one of the earliest Bengali grammars by a European, is remembered also as the first Englishman to be in-
Nevertheless, there had appeared by 1800 an assortment of texts
fluenced by Oriental mysticism. The best known was Sir William
and translarions of literary works, digests, and compendiumswhich, like Rennell's Bengal Atlas, were meant to facilitate colo-
200
Jones, the Calcutta Supreme Court judge and founder (in 1784) of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, who had built a formidable reputation as an Oriental scholar even before he made his passage to India. He engaged more comprehensively with Indian civiliza-
in English-grammars,
20 1
dictionaries, teaching aids, phrase books,
nization and explain the new acquisition both to the Company's servants in India and to an avid lirerary and scientific community back home in England.
tion than any Englishman has since: orthography, mythology, literature, chronology, chess, the zodiac, botany, music, and natural history are some of the subjects on which he contributed
'Expanding like the petals of young flowers', wrote Calcutta's
authoritative articles for the early volumes ofAsiatick Researches.
Henry Derozio in a sonnet addyessed to his students at Hindu
Described recently as 'one of the greatesr polymaths in history', Jones laid the foundation of historical linguistics when, in the
College, 'I watch the gentle opening of your minds.' What
'Third Anniversary Discourse' (1786), he made the assertion thar
nourished these young minds, bringing 'unnumbered kinds I Of new perceptions' to them, was colonial education.
Sanskrir, Greek, and Latin 'have sprung from a common source,
For twenty-five years before the founding of Hindu College in
which, perhaps, no longer exists'. H e went on to posit the norion
1817, and for nearly twenty years after ir, the nature and pur-
ofa common homeland for mankind, from which it had centuries
pose of colonial education and the Company's role in it had
ago migrated to differenr parc o f h e globe. T h e Hindus, he said,
been furiously debated in London and Calcurta by Britishers and Indians. In 1792, in one of the earliest discussions on the sub-
had an immemorial affinity with the old Persians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians, the Phenicians, Greeks, and Tuscans, the Scythians o r Goths, and Celts, the Chinese,/apanese, and Per'er2lzlians;whence, as no
jecr, a director of the East India Company had stated: 'we [have] just losr America from our folly, in having allowed the establish-
reason appears for believing, that they were a colony from any one of those nations, or any of those nations from them, we may fairly
the same act of f ~ l l yin regard to India.' All the same, the folly
conclude that they all proceeded from some central country, to investigate which will be the object of my future Discourses . . .
ment of schools and colleges
. . . [I]t would not do for us to repeat
was about to be repeated, rhough consensus on the kind of folly it would be was not easy to arrive at. In the debates that followed, the 'Committee of the Protestant Society' rook issue with
T h e Utilitarian philosopher James Mill, perhaps remembering
the Clapham sect. Rammohan Ray, who said in 1823 that
chis and similar passages, was later ro exclaim that the years spent
'the Sanskrir system of education would be besr calculated to
by 'Oriental Jones' in India had been a waste.
keep this country in darkness', similarly took up the cudgels
Between Jones's universalist ideas of race and Halhed's administrative ruler-ruled paradigm there is a world of difference.
on
behalf of English education for Indians and against the
'Orientalist' Horace H. Wilson. Matters came to a head during
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
Partial Recall the ~ ~ g l i ~ i ~ t - ~ r i e n tcontroversy alist of 1835, to be resolved once and for all by Thomas Babington Macaulay's 'Minute on Education' of the same year. It said in its most cited part: we must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters
between us and millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.
'BleddyMacaulay'sminutemen!
. . . English-medium misfits . . .
Square-peg freaks' is how a character in Salman Rushdie's The
203
the word 'God.' As a curiosity, 1 put below the first words of my cousin's Vocabulary, retaining the spelling of the English words as they were represented in the Bengali character: Gad Lad A'i Lu &to Bail
: : : :
: :
Isvara Isvara A'mi Tumi Karnlma Jamin
.
In the course of time. several East Indian gentlemen of Calcutta lent their services to the cause of Native education. They went to the houses of the wealthy Babus and gave regular instructions to their sons. They received pupils into their own houses, which were turned into schools. Under the auspices of these men, the curriculum of studies was enlarged. To the Spelling Book and the Schoolmaster were added the Tootinamah or the Zles of a Parrot, the Elements ofEnglish Grammar and the Artlbic~nNightslEntertainments.The man who could read and understand the last mentioned bookwas reckoned, in those days, a prodigy of learning
Moor? Last Sigh (1995) describes the 'class of persons' it was Macaulay's mission to create. T h e class had long been in the process of formation and consisted largely of the new urban Clite, the rising bhadralok population of Calcutta. Many of them were immigrants with landed property in the interior districts, but were drawn to the city by the promise ofoffice jobs in the expanding British administration, the key to which was a knowledge of English. For 'the sons of respectable Hindoos' there was Hindu College, where they acquired, as the Committee on Public Instruction observed in 1830, 'a command of the English language, and . . . familiarity with its literature and science . . . rarely equalled by any schools in Europe'. O f how English was learned by aspiring natives at the other end of the educational spectrum, in the hamlets and villages of Bengal, La1 Behari Day has left a moving account. In the chapter on 'English Education in Calcutta before 1834' in Recollections of My School-days, serialized
specialists, but when they were published they were, by the mere
in Berzgal Magazine between 1872 and 1876, Day writes:
fact of being in English, audacious acts of mimicry and self-
When I was a little boy I had a sight of one of these Vocabularies, which used to be studied by a cousin of mine in my native village at Talpur. The English words were written in the Bengali character, and the volume, agreeably to the custom of the Hindus, began with
O n e consequence of the changes taking place in Indian society under colonialism was that Indians had mastered the colonizer's language (as the colonizers had mastered theirs) and, going one step further, had by the 1820s begun to adopt it as their chosen medium of expression. These pioneering works of poetry, fiction, drama, travel, and belles-lettres are little read today except by
assertion. More than this, the themes they touched on and the kinds of social issues they engaged with would only be explored by other Indian literatures several decades later. Krishna Mohan Banerjea's The Persecuted (183 1) might not be good theatre, but
204
Partial Recall
the subject of Hindu orthodoxies and the individual's loss of faith
A majority of the writers associated with the journals either knew
in his religion had not been taken up by any Indian play before it. Banerjea, who was 18 years old when he wrote The Persecuted,
English or were exposed to the English language, and this conditioned their world-view and literary style to a great extent. Most ofthem . . . did not write with literary pretensions; but all of them, consciously or unconsciously, took part in the great experiment which brought about a real breakthrough in Indian literature. An awareness of social problems, a rational view as opposed to a theocentric universe, a spirit of enquiry, a desire to examine one's past heritage-all these appeared in prose rather than in poetry. Here is the historic importance of prose in Indian literature.
soon afterwards converted to Christianity. H e was one of the leading lights of 'Young Bengal', as Derozio's disciples called themselves, and founder-editor of The Enquirer (1831-5). Kylas Chunder Dutt's 'A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945' (1835) is about an imaginary armed uprising against the British. Insurrection seems a commonplace idea, until we realize that the idea is being expressed for the first time in Indian literature, and would next find expression only in folk songs
This magisterial volume cove;s the period 1800-1 9 I0 and is
inspired by the events of 1857. It is uncanny that the year of the
subtitled 'Western Impact: Indian Response': the metaphor of
uprising in Dutt's imagination comes within two years of India's
collision, suggesting destruction and debris with signs of survival
actual year of Independence; uncanny, too, the coincidence that
in its midst, is well chosen. It is one way oflooking at the literature
the work should have been published in the same year that Macau-
of the nineteenth century. We can also see the period in terms of
lay delivered his 'Minute'. In a double irony, the insurgents are
hybridization and variety, of mutation and the inevitable divides
all urbanized middle-class Indians with the best education colo-
brought about by colonialism.
nialism could offer, the very class Macaulay had intended as
Among the earliest poets to take part in 'the great experiment'
'interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern'. A
was Rangalal Banerjee, whose Padmini Upakhyan (1858), written
fable like 'n lournal of Forty-Eight Hours', where the 'language
at the request o f a patron who wanted a poem that was not 'in bad
of command' is stood on its head and turned into the language
taste' or 'lacking in virtuousness', took its story from Col. James
of subversion, suggests itself as the imaginative beginnings of
Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829). It told of
a nation.
Hindu valour and heroism in medieval times, during the reign of
A second and no less profound consequence of colonial educa-
Allauddin Khilji. In the course of the poem, making a switch from
tion was the transformation it brought about in the literature
looking at the past to examining the present, Banerjee inserted
of the Indian languages. To begin with, it introduced Indians to
a free translation of some lines of Thomas Campbell-'From
the potentialities of prose, a medium relatively unknown to them.
without freedom / O h , who would not fly? /For one day of
Writing about the spread ofjournalism in the 1840s-the
freedom / O h , who would not die?'-giving
decade
which saw the launch of Digdarsan and Prabhakar in Marathi,
Vartaman Tarangini in Telugu, Tattuabodhini Patrika in BenKumar Das in A gali, and Khair Khwah-e Hind in Urdu-Sisir History of Indian Literature, volume V I I I ( 1 991), says:
life
them to a Rajput
king to speak. The poem, which appeared a year after the rebellion of 1857, ends abruptly on a pro-British note, but its patriotic message would not have been lost on its readers: for the Muslim Khilji they would simply have read the current dispensation. T h e
Partial Recall
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
equation seems unfortunate with hindsight, but then that is
Bengal Renaissance. It came in the wake of colonialism, and its beginnings were the writings ofRammohan Ray. Bengal tasted the exotic fruits of the awakening first, but it rapidly spread to other parts of the country, especially in the decades following 1857. Though made in the context ofEmpire, Lord Curzon's metaphor that 'We are trying to graft the science of the West on an Eastern stem' could be a description of the work not just of the poets and dramatists but of the early novelists as well. T h e novels that were abundantly and cheaply available to them, except for The Vicar of Wakejeld and the novels of Scott, were by Benjamin Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton, ~ a r i ~ed r e l l i~, i l k i ~eo l l i n sand , G.W.M. Reynolds. It was to these minor figures of the Victorian era that Indians turned when they crafted their first fictions. Between 1866 and 1889, during the halcyon days of the Raj, Nandshankar Mehta in Gujarati, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya ('the Scott of Bengal') in Bengali, Samuel Vedanayakam Pillai in Tamil, M.V. Rohalkar in Marathi, Kandukuri Viresalingam Pantulu in Telugu, and 0.Chandu Menon in Malayalam were among several who published novels that, though written in the 'vernaculars', were mediated by English fiction, and sometimes had the support of English officials. 'The former education inspector of our State M r Russell', wrote Nandshankar Mehta in the introduction to Karan Ghelo (1866), 'has expressed to me his desire to see Gujarati books written along the lines of English novels and romances. I have written this novel according to that plan.' And Samuel Pillai, who was a district munsif, states in the preface (written in English) of Piratapa Mutaliyar Carittiram, or The LiJd.and Adventures of Prathapa Mudaliar (1 879) that in his book, whose object it was 'to supply the want of prose works in Tamil', he has 'represented the principal personages as ~erfectly virtuous, in accordance with the opinion of the great English moralist Llr Johnson.'
206
hindsight. Banerjee was in the employ of the British and could not afford to bite the hand that fed him. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya was also to cunningly locate his nationalist novel Ananda Math (1882) in the past, and for precisely the same reason. Though Padmini Upakhyan was a modest success at the time (a third reprint came out in 1872), it is today remembered chiefly for a long preface in which Banerjee unambiguously states reasons for importing English elements into his Bengali work. He writes: Firstly, many Bengalis who do not know the English language think there is no superior poetry in that language, and it is important that they be rid of such delusion. Second, the more poems that are composed in the Bengali language along the purer system of English poetic conventions, the more we shall witness the exit of the immodest, mean body of poetry that currently exists . . . [Translation by Rosinka Chaudhuri] Rangalal Banerjee's contemporary, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the inventor of blank verse in Bengali, was another who drew on Tod's Annals-for his play Krishna Kzrmari (1861). However, just how completely the insular world of the Indian writer had been infiltrated by its contact with English is shown by what Dutt wrote in defence of an earlier play, Sermista (1 858), which was based on a story from the Mahabharata: 'I am writing for that portion of my countrymen', Dutt said, 'who think as I think, whose minds have been more or less imbued with Western ideas and modes of thinking and that it is my intention to throw off the fetters forged for us by a servile admiration for every thing Sanskrit.' Both Rangalal Banerjee and Michael Madhusudan D u t t were products of that intellectual and cultural awakening-turmoil would be a better word-known as the
207
208
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
Partial Recall
209
Mehta's and Pillai's are probably the first novels to have been
had wondered if the reader was ready for a story 'about the things
written in Gujarati andTamil, as is 0.C h a n d u Menon's Indulekha
we experience daily'; the success of Indulekha shows that at least
(1889) in Malayalam. In the dedicatory letter to W. Dumergue,
the Malayalam reader was. T h e first printing sold out within three
w h o translated Indulekha 'into the "lingua franca" of the East',
months and there were sixty reprints until 1971, a figure which
Chandu Menon gives his reasons for writing the novel:
would not have surprised C h a n d u Menon in the least, w h o said ,-
First my wife's oft-expressed desire to read in her own language a novel written after the English fashion, and secondly a desire on my part to try whether I should be able to create a taste amongst my Malayalee readers, not conversant with English, for that class of literature represented in the English language by novels, ofwhich at present they (accustomed as they are to read and admire works of fiction in Malayalam abounding in events and incidents foreign to nature and often absurd and impossible) have no idea, a n d . . . to illustrate to my Malayalee brethren the position, power and influence that our Nair women, who are noted for their natural intelligence and beauty, would attain in sociev if they were given a good English education; and finally-to contribute my mite towards the improvement of Malayalam literature which I regret to observe is fast dying out by disuse as well as by abuse.
Indulekha came o u t of Menon's attempt at translating Disraeli's Henrietta Temple (1837), which he abandoned after only a few pages, deciding wisely t o write his own novel instead. T h o u g h thematically a love story with impediments and a happy ending, and o n occasion containing stylistic elements of the folk tale, it
in the preface: Others again asked me, while I was employed on this novel, how I expected to make it a success if I described only the ordinary affairs of modern life without introducing any element of the supernatural. My answer was this: Before the European style of oil-painting began to be known and appreciated in this country, we had-painted in defiance of all possible existence-pictures of Vishnu as half man and half lion, pictures of the deity of the chase, pictures of bruteheaded monsters, pictures of the god Krishna with his legs twisted and twined into postures in which no biped could stand and blowing a cowherd's horn . . . Such productions used to be highly thought of, and those who produced them used to be highly remunerated, but now they are looked upon by many with aversion. A taste has set in for pictures, whether in oil or watercolours, in which shall be delineated men, beasts, and things according to their true appearance, and the closer that a picture is to nature the greater is the honour paid to the artist. Just in the same way, if stories composed of incidents true to natural life, and attractively and gracefully written, are once introduced, then by degrees the old order of books, filled with the impossible and the supernatural, will change, yielding place to the new.
is in every other respect radically different from previous works in
Taken together, Menon's preface and dedicatory letter read like
Malayalam. Set 'in our own times', its events occur in a n identifi-
a manifesto of Indian literature, one of several that were written
able place ('not far away from Native Cochin'), and it is written,
in the nineteenth century. Arising o u t of a colonial situation, they
says Menon, 'in the style of Malayalam which I speak at h o m e
capture the spirit of a future age. Their key words are 'innovation',
with such Sanskrit words as I might use in conversation with a n
'intelligence', 'style', 'elegance', 'skill', and the key phrase is 'new
educated Malayalee.' Just twenty years earlier the Marathi writer
departure'. Decades later, Ezra Pound would echo them in his
Naro Sadashiv Risbud, who was a n admirer of the Arabian Nights,
dictum 'Make it new'.
Partial Recall
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
~ h its poems, ~ plays, ~ and~ novelsh appear now to be didactic and purposeful, the colonial avant garde had done its job: it had brought a new 'English' imagination-new forms, new situations,
form of nationalism or with the mother-tongue syndrome,
2 10
a new sense of time and a new spatial bustle-to literatures that were 'fast dying out by disuse as well as by abuse'. Rabindranath Tagore articulated the same liberating sentiment in My Reminis-
2 11
which are often the same thing. In the period after Independence the mother-tongue syndrome quickly hardened into nativism, of which there can only be one-pernicious-kind. The good-natured scolding Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya gave Romesh Chunder Dutt for not writing in Bengali is an
cences (19 14). ' [O]ur hearts', he wrote, 'naturally craved the lifebringing shock of the passionate emotions expressed in English
example of the proto-nationalist point of view: 'You will never
literature. Ours was not the aesthetic enjoyment of literary art,
Gobindo Chandra and Shoshi Chandra and Madusudan Dutt
but the jubilant welcome of a turbulent wave from a situation of stagnation . . .'
were the best educated men in Hindu College in those days.
Chandu Menon, who had risen from sixth clerk to munsif to
never live, Madhusudan's Bengali poetry will live so long as the
sub-judge in the Madras Presidency, was, in appreciation of his services to the government, conferred the title of Rao Bahadur.
Bengali language will live.' Coming from one who had himself abandoned English after writing his first novel in it, the words had
But he would have found the second honour that came to him in
their effect. Dutt published his first Bengali novel, Bangabijeta,
the shape of a certificate from Queen Victoria, Empress of India,
in 1874 and went on to write five others. He also continued to
'in recognition of the services rendered by him in the cause of
write prolifically in English, his classic work being a two-volume
Malayalam literature', not less glory-giving.
indictment of British economic policy titled Economic History ofIndia (1902 and 1904). The book made a deep impression on Gandhi, who refers to it in HindSujaraj (1 9 10). O u t of his quarrel
The exposure to English that colonialism necessitated led some
with others came Dutt's writings in English, and out of the quar-
Indian writers to discover prose and the realist novel, or blank
rel with himself those in Bengali. He described himself as a 'lite-
verse and the sonnet, whose grafts they inserted in their tropical
rary patriot'.
live by your writing in English
. . . Look at others. Your uncles
.
Gobindo Chandra and Shoshi Chandra's English poems will
languages and where they have since flourished. Other writers
In the nationalist period the posthumous gains ofwriting in the
with a similar social background and with the same Macaulayan
mother tongue versus writing in English paled into insignificance
education reversed the procedure, as it were, and sought to tie and
before the more immediate need to forge a national language,
wax themselves to an English stem. Though there were no mis-
whose absence was felt by all sections of the Indian intelligent-
givings about this writing initially-nor
sia. 'If you want to draw a nation together there is no force more
indeed about English-
things started to change in the 1870s.
powerful than a common language for all', Bal Gangadhar Tilak
The misgivings appear to be on several counts, but all of them, in the period before Independence, have to do either with some
said as early as 1905, addressing a meeting ofthe Nagari Pracharini Sabha at Benaras. What this common language was going to
2 12
Partial Recall
be-Hindi, Urdu, or Hindustani-was still not clear, though Tilak'himself meant Hindi by it. Five years later, joining his voice to Tilak's, Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj: 'TO give millions a
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
2 13
to Bhabani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers (1947), Gandhi is present in the fiction of the period both in the flesh and, through his ideas, in the spirit. He is present also in more hidden ways. After reading Gandhi's description in Young India of his en-
knowledge of English is to enslave them. 'The foundation that Macaulay laid of education has enslaved us.' And, 'A universal language for India should be Hindi.' By Hindi Gandhi always meant Hindustani. The term denoted a mongrel language spoken
rewrote Untouchable (1935). He felt that his narrative, compared with the simplicity and austerity of Gandhi's, was 'artificially
by both Hindus and Muslims across much of northern India
concocted'. Subsequently, when he read out the novel to Gandhi
which, in 1925, he defined as 'a resultant of Hindi and Urdu, neither highly Sanskritised nor highly Persianised nor Arabian-
in Sabarmati Ashram, Gandhi advised him 'to cut meretricious
counter with Uka, a sweeper boy, Mulk Raj Anand went back and
literariness' from it. It's a piece of advice that Ford Madox Ford might have offered a young writef. When Anand rather mawkishly
ised.' Gandhi left the choice of writing this Hindustani in either 'Persian or Nagari characters' to individual users of it.
wanted to know whether he should continue to write exclusively
Issues oflanguage are seldom resolved overnight, and in fact the
in English, Gandhi's response was characteristically forthright.
Hindi-Hindustani question was being debated, often bitterly,
'The purpose of writing is to communicate, isn't it?' he said. 'If
until the 1940s. Eventually, Gandhi's Hindi (or Hindustani), which had Nehru's complete support, lost out to the Hindi of the
so, say your say in any language that comes to hand.' Between Gandhi's many-sided opposition to English and his
Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, a literary institution established in
encouragement ofAnand there is no contradiction. His opposition
1910 to fight for Hindi's cause, and whose early meetings had
was not to English but to what it symbolized: political slavery and
been attended by nationalist leaders like Sarojini Naidu and
cultural degradation. 'I know husbands who are sorry that their
C. Rajagopalachari. It was this Hindi, Sanskrit-blest, purged of Urdu elements, and 'written in Devanagari script', which came to
wives cannot talk to them and their friends in English. I know families in which English is being made the mother tongue', he
be enshrined in the Constitution as 'The official language of
had written in Young Zndia in 192 1. If English in the nationalist
the Union.'
period symbolized everything that was wrong with the country,
While the battle over language raged, overall it was little more
Hindi and the mother tongues suggested everything that was
than a sideshow to the freedom movement. If the Indian novel in
right. English stood for the colonial past, shortly to be left be-
English had its first birth in 1864, when Bankimchandra
hind; the 'vernaculars' for the times ahead, soon to unfold at a
Chattopadhyaya's Rajmohanj W$e was serialized in The Indian
midnight hour made famous by Nehru's 1947 speech and now
Field, and its third in the 1980s,when Salman Rushdie's Midnight? Children and I. Allan Sealy's The Trotter-Nama were published,
done to death by repeated literary invocation.
its second coming is in the Gandhian nationalist phase which
status also provided that English 'shall continue to be used for all
began in the 1920s. The factor which is common to these novels is Gandhi. From K.S. Venkataramani's Murugan, The Tiller ( 1927)
the official purposes of the Union' for a period of fifteen years,
The Constitution of 1950 that gave Hindi 'official language'
until 1965. It was a provision made at Nehru's insistence and, by
Partial Recall
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
the proponents of Hindi, denounced at the time. Speaking before
regional language like any other and no longer possessed the pan-
the Constituent Assembly on 8 November 1948, when prepara-
Indian aura it did during the freedom movement-renewed
tions for drafting the Constitution were getting under way,
agitation to remove the language of colonial rule. But now a
Nehru, without mentioning Hindi directly (though the audience
counter-agitation was launched in the non-Hindi-speaking states
was left in no doubt what he meant), said:
of the south, thus dividing the country into two camps: an anti-
214
2 15
their
English camp and apro-English one. The north was for abolishing Any attempt to impose a particular form of language on an unwilling people has usually met with the strongest opposition and has actually resulted in something the very reverse of what the promoters thought . . . I would beg this House to consider the fact and to realise, if it agrees with me, that the surest way of developing a natural allIndia language is not so much to pass resolutions and laws on the subject, but to work to that end in other ways.
English from educational institutions and from the state administration and for switching over to Hindi; in the south people agitated for the opposite reason: for retaining English and against imposing Hindi upon them. Since Hindi was now to be the sole 'official language', the people of South India feared they would be compelled to learn it-their
fear was not unfounded. The
Hindi poet Dhoomil has called this period in post-Independence Languages, Nehru had written in a letter from Almora Jail to his daughter Indira in Santiniketan, were 'desirable and . . . tricky things'. They had to be learnt willingly, and at an early age; they had to be wooed. To impose a language on others, more so an 'official language', was repugnant to him. Furthermore Nehru was aware, as early as 1948, ofthe resistance to such an imposition. He always described Hindi as 'a national language' or as 'one of the national languages', yet he was among the first political leaders to realize that the southern half of the country, which spoke Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam, would never accept Hindi. H e touched repeatedly on the dangers inherent in legislating on language, on making it the subject of 'resolutions and laws'. In fact he would be preoccupied with these thoughts even in the months preceding his death in 1964. The 'opposition' to imposing 'a particular form of language on
Indian history 'The Night of Language': In the eyes of the true butcher, Your Tamil misery And my Bhoipuri gief Are one and the same. In the mouth of that beast, Who is one thing in the street And another in parliament, Language is a piece of meat. So quitting the street's darkness, Come out into the street -Not language but man Has to be put right firstCome out in the'fourteen Tongues that you speak. [Translation by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra]
an unwilling people', which Nehru had warned against, arrived as if on cue. In the early 196Os, as the year in which English was to
In this extract the 'true butcher' and 'hungry beast' is the politician
cease 'to be used for all the official purposes of the Union' drew
who raises the emotive issue of language for his own selfish ends,
near, the enthusiasts of Hindi-forgetting
leaving the real issues untouched.
that Hindi was now a
Partial Recall
216
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
2 17
T h e Official Language Bill was brought before parliament in
edited by Stephen Spender and Donald Hall, is on Indian poetry
1963 and passed the same year, extending the constitutional
in English, but the attitude behind it is not confined to verse
of English beyond the fifteen-year period. It reassured
alone. It begins:
non-Hindi speakers that English would continue to be used in their states so long as they did not themselves want a change, nor
It may seem surprising that Indians, who have always had a firm poetic tradition in their own languages, should ever have tried to write verse in English. That they did so, was the outcome of the anglomania which seized some upper-class Indians in the early years of British rule. Sons (and sometimes daughters) were sent to England even before they had reached teen-age, and there they spent all their formative years. Thus it was that English became the poetic vehicle of a number of gifted Indians . .*.
would a knowledge of Hindi be compulsorily required of anyone seeking employment in the central government. Tamil Nadu greeted the news by eliminating the teaching of Hindi from its secondary schools, Uttar Pradesh having already adopted a similar measure against English. In the debate on the bill, speaking with a passion that came to be expected of him when the subject was language, Nehru explained why he was pressing for retaining English in India. T h e
And it famously concludes:
British invasion, he said, had 'administered a shock' to our people, As late as 1937, Yeats reminded Indian writers that 'no man can think or write with music and vigour except in his mother-tongue'; to the great majority of Indians this admonition was unnecessary, but the intrepid few who left it unheeded do not yet realise that 'Indo-Anglian' poetry is a blind alley, lined with curio shops, leading nowhere.
but the shock had its positive side. O u r languages, which like our lives had become 'static', were made 'more dynamic' through their contact with English. English would 'serve as a vitaliser to our languages' in the future, as it had in the past. Succeeding events, both linguistic and literary, have proved Nehru right. Nehru had succeeded in stopping the clock which was ticking away for English. It is all the more paradoxical, therefore, that
T h e quote from Yeats is inaccurate, and the date, 1937, is in-
just when the threat seemed to lift and the future of English in
correct. Bose was obviously quoting from memory. What is
India looked secure, Indian literature in English came to be seen
more important, though, is that the statement hit home and a
as a historical aberration and a literary dead-end. T h e best-known
response was delivered six years later in the form of a 600-page
statement of this point of view was, unfortunately, penned by
compilation, by far the largest work of its kind yet, called Modern
Buddhadeva Bose, who, apart from being one ofthe finest Bengali
Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and Credo (1969), edited
poets of the post-Tagore generation, wrote some excellent essays
by
in English and whose translations of modern Bengali poetry
publishing house run by La1 himself.
I? La1 and published by Writers Workshop, Calcutta, a vanity
(Jibanananda Das, Amiya Chakravarty, Samar Sen, BenoyMajum-
La1 had decided to speak on behalf of the 'Indo-Anglians', or
dar) are unsurpassed even today. Bose's entry in the Concise
maybe he was stung by Bose's description of him as a 'publisher
Encyclopaedia of English and American Poets and Poetry (1963),
and publicist', a 'representative figure' of 'a new group who are
2 18
Partial Recall
assiduously courting the Muse of Albion'. At any rate, he sent cyclostyled copies of Bose's entry to seventy-five poets, along with a questionnaire. Among the questions the recipients had to answer were: 'What are the circumstances that led to your using the English language for the purpose of writing poetry?' 'What are your views on the "Indo-Anglian" background?' and 'Do you
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
2 19
that they should. I think the real question is whether they can. And if they can, they will. (A.K. Ramanujan) The circumstances that led me to write in English are simple-I belong to that unfortunate minority, anglomaniacs all, who even puked in English when three weeks old. My umbilical cord was anglicised. (Lawrence Bantleman)
think English is one of the Indian languages?'The sixth questionspecifically to Sri Aurobindo,
T h e replies to the questionnaire, however, take up only a small
whom Bose had praised by saying, 'In authenticity of [English] diction and feeling Sri Aurobindo far out-shines the others . . .'
part of the book's 600 pages. T h e bulk of it consists of the work
The questionnaire quoted this and added archly: 'Your comments,
There are also biographical no& and, in most cases, photo-
please.' Some of the replies and comments are given below:
graphs. O n e poet is disguised as a common North Indian labourer;
there were seven in all-referred
I thought we have had more than enough of whether or no English should be used in India as a means of communication-creative communication included. Mr. Bose might be irrelevant since English is there and a work of erudition or art is acceptable or not acceptable on merit. And there are fairly accurate instruments of assessing merit regardless of a writer's nationality, his ancestry, personal or group stress or history, or his ethnic and cultural credits and debits. (G.Lr.Desani)
of 132 poets, arranged alphabetically from Alford to Yousufzaie.
another, cigarette in hand, strikes the pose of a matinee idol. Both are bearded. La1 provides a long and somewhat urgent introduction. The language question was a 1960s issue in India and it has largely been forgotten. Since then, English has crept back into the northern states, but, with state governments washing their hands off it, public demand is met by private initiative. 'Englishmedium' nursery schools with names like Little Angles, JesusMarry, and Tinny Tots (the last being the name of one such school
I . . . agree that Indo-Anglian poetry is lined with curio shops, and I
in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, 1993) are to be found in many
am amused that Mr. Bose professes an admiration for the crassest of them all, Sri Aurobindo. (Nissim Ezekiel)
parts of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and
I do believe that the tradition back of me is not of Rabindranath Tagore or Aurobindo. I would rather say that my background is Auden and MacNeice, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Sarojini Naidu and Toru Dutt never excited me in the sense that The Waste Land and The Glass Menagerie did. (Srinivas Rayaprol)
Bihar, and it would be safe to assume that the children who attend them are learning English by methods not too different from those by which La1 Behari Day's cousin learnt his 170 years ago. O n the other hand, the South imbibes whatever Hindi it does by watching Bollywood films and television serials. While there has largely been a lull on the language front, the
I do not quite know how to reply to your questions because I have
picket from which Bose fired his blunderbuss has seldom been
really no strong opinions on Indians writing in English. Buddhadeva Bose has strong opinions on why they should not; you are persuaded
inactive. In fact it has become the Siachen of Indian literature. In 'Does Language Matter?', a piece which appeared in the Times
220
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
Partial Recall
To be precise, the mode of operation of English as a supra-language in India has been cultural-written-formal rather than social-oralconversational in the national linguistic context. Such a written variety which has not emerged from the soil is highly detrimental to creative use . . . The English language has become thus a pathetic necessity for post-Independence Indians, the widows of the British Empire, and it is retained in India mainly because it maintains what can be called 'equality of disadvantage' among Indians of different mothertongues. It survives on the impoverishment resulting from multilingualism encouraged by our tolerant national culture; and by occupying the position of a supra-language, it aggravates this impoverishment further.
of India of 26 March 1988, Sham Lal, a former editor of the paper, wrote: ~f the nationalists' dream of developing Hindi as the link language has gone sour, so has the westernizers' dream of domesticating English . . . Mr. Raja Rao's brave talk that 'we shall have the English language with us and amongst us, and not as guest or friend, but as one of our own, of our caste, our creed, our sect and of our tradition' was a bit ofblarney. Curiously, he also said that English 'is the language of our intellectual make-up and not of our emotional make-up'. But can a person reserve the nuances of his thought and feeling for rwo separate languages without developing a split personality?
.
Whereas every word in the mother-tongue presents its own geology, the words in a foreign language offer insipid solidarity to the writer's competence. A foreign language thus suppresses the natural originality of Indian writers in English, enforcing on the whole tribe the fine art of parrotry. It is worth noting in this context that the cases of Indians praising Indians' command over English are more frequent than those of Englishmen making patronising understatements about Indians' use of English. This smacks of the Crusoe-Friday relationship, since an Indian nightingale does not receive even the status of a crow in the history of English literature.
Sham La1 ends by saying: 'There was a time when a British writer jeeringly described Indian writing in English as "Matthew Arnold in a sari" a n d an Indian professor hastened t o correct h i m a n d said it would be more appropriate t o compare it t o a "Shakuntala in skirts".' A m o n g those w h o have joined Buddhadeva Bose a n d Sham La1 behind the sandbag of the mother tongue is Bhalchandra Nemade, Tagore Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bombay a n d well known as a Marathi novelist. Given below are three extracts from his Indo-Anglian Writings:
Two Lectures (1 99 1): What is understood today as 'Indo-Anglian Writing' is one of the latest nomenclatures of a body of books, hyphenisedly christened by university academicians. The writer of this 'Inglish' species of Indian literary production is one who is Indian by birth or association and who, for a variety of reasons best known to himself, writes not in his mother tongue, but in English . . . Since India is a country fabulous in all kinds of idiosyncrasies, it is futile to question the existence of this writing and to be fair to it, let us accept it as an abnormal case of a historical development, even as wryly as Saros Cowasjee, who treats it like a disease: 'this is not a healthy trend, but it is there', she [sic]says.
22 1
T h e nightingale reference is t o Sarojini Naidu, w h o m G a n d h i called the 'Nightingale of India'. There is the o d d similarity between what Bose said in 1 9 6 3 a n d what Nemade said in 199 1. There are also profound differences, reflecting the change in the political climate from Nehru's time t o o u r own. Nemade, with passionate intensity, perceives cultures as being either strong, unitary, a n d male, or weak, diverse, a n d female. Weak cultures allow for a high degree of tolerance, but the more tolerance they show the more weak a n d impoverished they become. It is a vicious circle, a n d one in which 'our tolerant
I
national culture' is now trapped. A weak culture, nevertheless,
222
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needs to be held together, howsoever loosely; just as a houseful of widows needs to have a man around, if only to douse the flames when the widows set each other ablaze. In the case of a weak culture like India's, the cause of whose weakness is linguistic diversity, the presence of a dominating 'supra-language' is 'a pathetic necessity'. English performs the 'supra-language' function, but at the same time, because of the position it occupies, it im-
whole societies and situations afresh. T h e state of our own society may never have seemed so awful as it does now. Let it not be said in the future that by failing to find alternatives to the . . . regressive parochialism of our writers, we allowed it to become too awful for words. ('The New India, T h e New Media and Literature', The Indian I?E.N., Jan.-Feb. 1985)
poverishes the mother tongues further. Nemade's view of langu-
Compared with Nemade's extreme views, Bose's little sneer ('courting the Muse of Albion') and the caricature Sham La1
age and Indian society is everything that Nehru's was not.
alludes to ('Shakuntala in skirts') seem like friendly gestures. Their
Nemade had expressed similar views earlier, and they were even more immoderate. In a special issue ofNew Quest (May-June
jibes are a part of the history of colonial humour which goes
1984) on nativism he wrote:
babu was lampooned in any number of poems, songs, and panto-
A most ridiculous trend . . . is the way some of our writers strive to become 'national' and even 'international' by getting their work translated into English. This has become a spurious means of building literary reputations. It is time we realised the fact that beyond our own 'language group' all that we d o smacks of mediocrity. Like the sadhus camping in the Ram Leela ground in Delhi in G.V. Desani's AllAbout H. Hatterr, our writers and politicians seem to carry the nameboards: 'All-India Sadhu' and 'International Sadhu' and so on.
Nemade's opinions should have caused an uproar but didn't, and except for Adil Jussawalla and Vilas Sarang, nobody else took any notice of them. Quoting him on nativism, Jussawalla points out that Nemade defines nativism 'in Hindu revivalist terms', a phrase which encapsulates Nemade's cultural and political positions. Jussawalla's concluding sentences, in more ways than one, read like a prophecy: I fear the qualities of racist arrogance, self-centredness and isolationism are very much there in Nemade's concept of Nativism. If they don't doom the country to extinction, they may well doom the growth of a vital, imaginative and critical literature. Words are far from dead. In the best of literature, they free imprisoned visions and make us see
back to the nineteenth century, &hen the figure of the Bengali mimes, and in the popular art of Battala wood engravings and Kalighat paintings. Here is the babu in Mokshodayani Mukhopadhyaya's wholly unforgiving send-up: Alas, there goes our Bengali babu! H e slaves away from ten till four, Carrying his servitude like a pedlar's wares. A lawyer or magistrate, or perhaps a schoolmaster, A subjudge, clerk, or overseer: T h e bigger the job, the greater his T h e babu thinks he's walking on air. Red in the face from the day's hard labour, H e downs pegs of whiskey to relax when he's home. He's transported with pride at the thought of his rankBut faced with a sahib he trembles in fear! T h e n he's obsequious, he mouths English phrases, His own tongue disgusts him, he heaps it with curses. T h e babu's learned Englisll, he swells with conceit And goes off in haste to deliver a speech. H e flounders while speaking, and stumbles and stutters, Bur he's speaking in EngIisll: you must come and hear.
224
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The babu speaks a patter of Bengali and English But he berates the English with all his heart. These sports are but nocturnal; wiping his mouth, in the morning The babu is respectful and sober again. [Translation by Supriya Chaudhuri] 'Bangali Babu' appears in Women Writing in India, volume I (199 I), edited by SusieTharu and K. Lalita. It was written around 1880, the decade in which Mokshodayani Mukhopadhyaya's younger contemporary, Rudyard Kipling, who had a masterful ear for such things, was listening to patter of a quite different sort: 'part English, part Portuguese, and part Native', it was the speech of 'the Borderline folk'. The Borderline, says Kipling in 'His Chance in Life', an early story, is where the last drop of White blood ends and the full tide of Black sets in. It would be easier to talk to a new-made Duchess on the spur of the moment than to the Borderline folk without violating some of their conventions or hurting their feelings.The Black and the White mix very quaintly in their ways . . . One of these days, this peopleunderstand they are far lower than the class whence Derozio, the man who imitated Byron, sprung-will turn out a writer or a poet; and then we shall know how they live and what they feel. In the meantime, any stories about them cannot be absolutely correct in fact or inference. W h a t Mukhopadhyaya's conceited babu and Kipling's 'Borderline folk' were to the society of their day, the writer in English is to India's post-Independence literary space. An 'anglomaniac' with a 'split-personality', he is even now looked upon as a half-caste whose mixed literary parentage, 'part English. . . and part Native', is embodied, permanently, in the hyphenated phrase 'Indo-Anglian'.
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
225
The animosity towards Indian literature in English stems in large measure from the animosity towards the social class English has come to be identified with: a narrow, well-entrenched, metropolitan-based ruling tlite that has dominated Indian life for the past fifty and more years. But literature as a category is inclusive rather than exclusive. It is more complex, less homogeneous, than a social group, and cannot always be made coextensive with it. While it is true that many who write in English in India belong to the metropolitan tlite, it is also trGe that many who write at all, irrespective of language, belong to a privileged stratum. Growing up in small mofussil towns, they have attended local schools and their early education has been in an Indian language. These languages (Oriya, Marathi, Kannada) have, at times, been vehicles of creative expression for them as much as English. T h e Mysoreb0rnA.K. Ramanujan, whose mother tongue wasTamil, published his first collection of English poems, The Striders, in 1966, and three years later followed it with his first collection in Kannada. And Ramanujan's is by no means an isolated case. Arun Kolatkar's poems in Marathi and English started appearing in journals in the 1950s, and he has continued to publish, like Dilip Chitre, in both languages since. Not all Indian writers in English write in two languages of course, but they are nevertheless drawn from a mixed bilingual tlite which is far from exclusively metropolitan. Writing in two languagespan affliction not confined to poets-is one of several ways in which bilingualism expresses itself. Another is translation, especially translation by authors of their own work from an Indian language into English. Though the nature of these translations (with the exception of Tagore's) and the necessity of doing them have rarely been commented on, they
226
Partial Recall
have had a long history that goes back to Michael Madhusudan Dutt. In recent decades, among those who have made translations of their work into English are the Malayalam novelist O.V. Vijayan and the Kannada playwright Girish Karnad, and their translations have been widely acclaimed. However, for an insider's view ofwhat negotiating a text in two languages involves, and to know what the pleasures and pitfalls of 'dual citizenship in the world of letters' are, we have to go to Vilas Sarang. In 'Confessions of a Marathi Writer' (World Literature Today, Spring 1994), Sarang says that the first full-length book in English he read was Tim Corbett's The Marl-eatirzg Leopard of Rudraprayag, at age sixteen. Before this, he read books only in Marathi. Sarang's 'first mature story' was written soon after, in 1963, when he was an MA student at Bombay University. 'As it happens', he confesses, 'I wrote this story in English.' When the Marathi magazine Abhiruchi wanted the story, he offered to make 'a hasty crib, to my mind unsatisfactory and lacking the style of the original1. It was thus published in Marathi first in 1965. The English version of the story, 'Flies', had to wait until 198 1, when it appeared in London Magazine. 'As by then', Sarang writes, 'my other, later stories written in Marathi had appeared in English as translations, I allowed this story to appear in L M as "Translated from the Marathi", and that is how it stands in my 1990 collection, Fair Tree of the Void (Penguin India). Well, there's a "Marathi" writer for you.' But even those stories that he first wrote in Marathi 'are often covertly English'. 'As a matter of fact,' he says, 'I regard the English versions of my stories as the definitive text, and the "originaln Marathi as only a stage toward the final casting.' Why Sarang has bothered to write in Marathi at all is a question he answers himself:
Towards a History of Irzdian Literature of English
227
For most of my adult life, my stream of consciousness has flowed in English, and it is in a way odd that, when 1 sit down to write, I switch to thinking in Marathi. My conscious mind may function through English, but my unconscious is rooted in Marathi; and to draw upon the resources of my unconscious, I must go through the initial rites of passage in my native tongue. However, the conscious part of my mind being situated in English, i t still remains necessary to recreate the text in English. To write first in Marathi, then re-do the text in English, is thus a means of reconciling the two halves of my divided psyche. The authors Sarang admires are Kafka, Hemingway, Camus, and Beckett, and he sees himself as belonging, in a modest way, to the 'international modernist tradition'. 'Marathi literature is so hopelessly mired in the stick-in-the-mud middle-class ethos and reflexes', he says, 'that, from the beginning, I refused to have any truck with the sensibility it represented. The narrow, and subtly caste-marked, paths of Marathi literature I saw as something to avoid at any cost; a largely self-invented international tradition offered a liberating route to self-realization.' Still, there were Marathi writers associated with the Navakatha (New Story) movement in the 1950s, like Gangadhar Gadgil, Vyankatesh Madplkar, and Aravind Gokhale, whom Sarang read avidly when young, and he is quick to acknowledge that if he has been able to 'achieve some distinction as a short-story writer', it's because he 'stand [s] on their shoulders'. Coming to bilingualism, by which he means having an equally strong allegiance to two languages and laying claim to two literary traditions, Sarang describes the 'tricky situation' bilingualism can put the Indian writer in: Marathi readers have frequentlycomplained that my Marathi sounds as though it were translated from English, and I daresay they are not
228
Towards a History of lrzdian Literature of English
Partial Recall
entirely off the mark. At the same time, whenever I have written directly in English, there sometimes came the complaint that it did not sound quite English. . . It can be the unenviable fate of the bilingual writer to be turned away from both houses he considers his own. People everywhere have a very possessive and exclusive attitude to what they consider their language.
229
literature '[a] kind of cultural fundamentalism, closely allied to its religious variety'. 'As I remarked in an article published in Indian Literature in 1992', he says, ' "The Marathi literary world today resembles a little pond crowded with frogs croaking at each other in self-satisfaction." ' Given this 'regressive mood', Sarang is not too surprised by
T h e early 1960s, according to Sarang, was 'probably one of the
'the rise of a phenomenon called nativism (deshiuad)'. What does
best and liveliest periods in Marathi literary history'. T h e first
surprise him, though, is that 'its leader is Bhalchandra Nemade,
generation of post-Independence writers, brimming with confidence and possessing 'a new sense of identity' had come to
the one-time avant-garde, tradition-breaking author of Kosla,
maturity. Short-lived little magazines, often run by the writers themselves, mushroomed everywhere, and when they closed
with the practitioners of"rura1 literature" as its principal followers. They have accused writers such as'chitre, Kolatkar, and myself of being "slaves of Western culture".' Sarang is not one to pull his
down new ones took their place. 'Avant-gardism, experimentation, and creative crankiness were in vogue. The air was full of excite-
punches. H e replies to the slavery charge by calling nativism 'a
ment.' Sarang's Marathi contemporaries were Bhalchandra Nemade, Arun Kolatkar, and Dilip Chitre, and in 'Confessions'
is a movement by people who are afraid of the world, who want to retreat into their little hole in the dirtheap.'
he mentions each of them in turn. H e describes Nemade's Kosh
Sarang's essay reiterates many of the ideas and issues we have
(The Cocoon), a section of which he translated for Adil Jussawalla's pathbreaking anthology New Writing in India (1974), as a
met with before, in Derozio and Young Bengal, in Rangalal Banerjee and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, in Chandu Menon,
novel 'that overnight changed the face of Marathi fiction and
Tagore, and Nehru. Sham La1 asked if one can write in 'two sepa-
its style', and calls it 'the finest symbol of the brash and daring
rate languages without developing a split personality', and Sarang
creativity of that period'. Equally 'brash and daring' were Kolatkar
shows not only that one can, but that the condition of 'split' is
and Chitre, who wrote 'a poetry informed simultaneously by the
what keeps a literature in good shape, keeps it from becoming a
work of medieval Marathi poet-saints and the French symbolists
'little hole in the dirtheap'. Equally important for us, Sarang
and their modernist heirs'. 'I count myselffortunate', says Sarang,
touches on something which has always been known but is sel-
'that I began publishing my work at a time like this.'
dom remarked on, much less examined: the presence of the Indian
retrograde, hidebound, and perniciously limiting movement. It
But that time is past. When Sarang looks back on it and what
languages in Indian literatyworks in English, and the corresponding
it promised, it's as though on a golden age. Those who were once
presence in Indian-language texts of English. 'We are all instinct-
Chitre,
ively bilingual', Raja Rao said in the foreword to Kanthapura
and Sarang himself-'seem like lone rangers in an unconducive, hostile environment.' In place of the 'experimentation and creative crankiness' of the early 196Os, there is at work in Marathi
(1938). This instinctive bilingualism is what umbilically ties the writing done in English to the other Indian literatures.
the 'champions ofmodernism and innovation'-Kolatkar,
In the resistance to Indian writing in English, however, there
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has never been any let-up. In each decade new ways are found to marginalize it. If in the 1960s it was likened to 'a blind alley . . . leading no-where', in the 1990s it was seen as a phenomenon occurring not here, in India, but abroad. 'Writing for export' is how the Kannada novelist U.R. Anantha Murthy, a former chairman of the Sahitya Akademi (the National Aczdemy of Letten), reacted on the Amul India Show to the success of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997). The feeling that readers of such novels are mainly in the West and that the writing is essentially being done for them is now common, so much so that any attention a work receives is put down to the changed marketplace, to the large advance a novel occasionally fetches, to the publicity it generates in the Indian media. In the words of the historian Sumit Sarkar, "'Indo-Anglian" writing had to wait for postcolonial times to become a significant literary genre, under conditions of intensified globalization.' If this is an insight into the conditions that have recently made Indian writing something of a commodity to be sold via advertising hype, it needs, all the same, a corollary: unlike Coca-Cola, a piece of writing is savoured best in the place where its secret recipe is from, and more often than not it is only really possible for it to be most satisfyingly consumed in the same place too. A case in point is I. Allan Sealy's first novel The Trotter-Nama (1988). Sealy, who lives in India and New Zealand and is of the generation of 'Indo-Anglians' born after Independence, spent
Towards a History of Indian Literature of English
23 1
In a way my journey to London was instructive. 'Why London?' I am sonletimes asked. I took my script there because I liked the way the British produced books, and I did not like the way books were produced here. (As it happened the Americans [Knopf] produced a handsome first edition, and the British [Penguin] a shoddy offprint.) But there would have been a colonial component to my anxiety. If so, I got my deserts. Not one British newspaper reviewed the book when it appeared. Its discovery was an Indian critical undertaking; Indian papers and journals, Indian reviewers made its reputation. I am making a political, but I hope not chauvinistic, point. What my own experience taught me was that an English literary culture was coming of age here-and I had been blind to it.
T h e marketplace is in any case a ficltle thing. In the TLS of 8 August 1997, Amit Chaudhuri takes, as a writer should, a long view of the matter and sounds a cautionary note. 'We are, apparently', he says, in the midst of some sort of resurgence in Indian writing (in English). Few writers themselves will feel confident, in their hearts, that they are living and working in a creative boom, though they may be forgiven if they take advantage of the probably short-lived monetary benefits of its supposed existence; but journalists and publishers are busy assuring us that there is good cause for excitement . . . How much of the resurgence has to d o with what publishers in England consider the marketability of Indian fiction, and how much of it is genuine achievement, will take at least twenty or thirty years, or more, to decide.
seven years writing the novel, at the end of which he repaired to a short essay he contributed to Indian Review of Books (0ct.-
There is in The Trotter-Nama, which is dedicated to 'The Other Anglo-Indians', a section devoted to Henry Derozio. H e appears
NOV. 1993), Sealy recounts his brush with the conditions of globalization:
in the novel as Henry Luis Vivian Fonseca-Trotter. In sharp contrast to the man-who-imitated-Byron figure mentioned derisively
London where the manuscript made the publishers' rounds. In
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in Kipling's story, Fonseca-Trotter is a prospective indigo planterturned-revolutionary poet and Hindu College lecturer ('ink, not indigo, he declared loftily, was his medium'), whose 'students flocked to hear his sparkling but closely reasoned lectures, which ranged from speculative philosophy to poetic justice, and afterwards they gathered around him, won over by his charm and springy hair, to broach the issues ofthe day: the condition oflndia,
Tow a r d a History of Indian Literature of English
233
who was the only Indian whose English verse was recognised as poetry in England, and the other girl was her sister Aru. They were the daughters of Govinda Dutt of Rambagan and had died young, we were further told. In fact, the picture had been published as an illustration to a Bengali poem mourning their death. When we first saw their picture I could not read the poem or anything at all. But I felt very proud that a Bengali girl had secured a place in English literature. My brother also felt proud. So did our parents.
the mastery of Europe, the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' At these meetings, which lasted well into the night, the
T h e second is in V.S. Naipaul's Letters Between a Father a n d
students, in defiance of social norms, would drink wine and eat
Son (1999). O n 5 October 1950, Seepersad Naipaul wrote to Vidia, then in his first term at oxford:
beef, and once during a particularly convivial evening 'they tossed the bones of their feast into the house of a friend to taunt his orthodox father'. Fonseca-Trotter gets thrown out of his job as a result but dies soon after, aged twenty-three, in a cholera epidemic. This is a literature whose writers have seldom acknowledged each other's presence. T h e reason is perhaps that outside a common geography-'the and 1ndus'-and
tract situated between the river Ganges
their location in the English language there is
Do send me a copy of R.K. Narayani Mr Sampath. The book is very favourably spoken of in The Ear$ Work in Literature, 1 9 4 S a n annual publication of the British Council. Narayan is spoken of as 'the most delightful of Indian novelists writing in English . . . in a way that no English writer of our time can rival.' It is published by Eyre and Spottiswode, Ltd, 6 Great New St., London, EC4. The price is not given. I shall refund you the money.
little else they felt they could share. Sealy's tribute to Derozio, a tribute from one Anglo-Indian writer to another, from one 'Indo-
Sealy's adoring portrait of Derozio; Chaudhuri's Bengali pride
Anglian' to his literary forebear, is exceptional. It is also among
in Toru and Aru Dutt; Seepersad Naipaul making a touching
the few times that the literature has encrypted its history in one
request of his son for an R.K. Narayan novel: in moments like
of its texts. Art, it has been said, is its own historian.
these, almost unknowingly, a literature becomes aware of itself,
Two other moments stand out, both very different from the
which is a different thing from others becoming aware of a
above and from eachother. The first occurs in Nirad C. Chaudhuri's
literature. The former is indigenization; the latter globalization.
The Autobiography o f a n Unknown Indian (195 1 ) :
Whether one looks at the nineteenthcentury, when the English language was a mould into which the Indian writer tried to cast
In a Bengali magazine subscribed to by my mother there had appeared in 1901 an illustration showing two Bengali girls in the lateVictoria11 English dress. 'Who are these @Is?' we asked in some perplexity, for they, though dressed like English girls, did not look English. My mother explained that the older girl-wasToru Dutt, the young poetess
himself-the
poems in The D u t t Family Album (1870) are an
example of this-or
at the twentieth, when the writer has become
the moulding agency, a striking feature of Indian literature in English is that there have been no schools, literary movements, or
234
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even regional groups within it. Its history is scattered, discontinuous, and transnational. It is made up of individual writers who appear to be suigeneris. They are explained neither by what went before them nor by what came after. But this is now chafiging. 'Hard to imagine I. Allan Sealy's Trotter-Nama without Desani. My own writing, too, has learnt a thing or two from him', Rushdie has said recently; and Mukul Kesavan, who heard Rushdie read from Midnight; Children in Cambridge in 198 1, has described it as a 'religious experience'. Kesavan, who was a research student at the time, brought out his own Rushdie-inspired first novel, Looking Through Glass ( 1 995), fourteen years later. This literary effort, alongside those by others who were contemporaries at Delhi's St Stephen's College in the 1970s, has been somewhat playfully described as a 'school' in The Fiction of St. Stephen? (2000). Though the literature's past does not reflect its present, maybe its present, which has increasingly become self-perceiving and self-recognizing, holds in it the seeds of its future.
If you also have been a part of the literature being mapped, then its contour will somewhere bear a likeness to your own. As a seventeen-year-old thirty-seven years ago, when I was in the small towns of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh hammering out my first poems on a grandfatherly typewriter, Indian literature, whether in English or in the Indian languages, was not something I was even dimly aware of. I cannot say what thoughts filled my adolescent mind then, except that I was in love with the smoothness of the black keys and the long space bar, and with the clattering sound they made when pressed. Nothing, I felt, could be lovelier than the sight of a line forming on a white sheet, letter
I
I 1
\
I
23 5
by letter; no movement more gaceful than the carriage's as it slid from right to left; no music sweeter than the bell's which rose warningly from the depths of the machine and which meant that the carriage could proceed no further. Recently, while emptying out a steel almirah in my house in Dehra Dun, I came across carbon copies of a few of those early poems and read them with embarrassment first, but afterwards in the expectation of learning a little about myself and the kind of literary fledgling 1 was in 1964. Some of the poems 1 looked at used capital letters, but others did not. My subjects were the indestructibility of love and the'earth's destruction, and I used words like 'adieu' and 'gloam'. The shorter poems, of which there were several, seemed to be written in the belief that anything of haiku length is automatically also profound. In 1964, the year Nehru died, the year VS. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness was published, I was sitting in darkness's heart, in a bungalow in Allahabad, in a railway waiting room in Bilaspur, and as scores of Indian poets-from Henry Derozio to Srinivas Rayaprol-had done before me, I was taking my bearings from distant stars. The two I took mine from were e.e. cummings and Kahlil Gibran.
Looking for A.K Ramanujan
Looking for A.K. Ramanujan
In looking for ways to describe A.K. Ramanujan and the many disciplines he straddled, one thinks, with reason, of performing men: in his teens Ramanujan had wanted to become a professional magician, and even got a neighbourhood tailor to stitch him a coat with hidden pockets and elastic bands, to which he added a tophat andwand. Thus outfitted, he appeared before school and club audiences, plucking rabbits and bouquets of flowers out of thin air, just as in later life he enthralled his classes at the University of Chicago with his lectures, and his readers across the globe with a steady flow of poems, translations, and essays. 'Beginning often with a provocative question', Milton Singer has said ofhis teaching method, 'Raman would proceed to present such a diversity of texts and contexts, oral and written tales, poems, interviews, and conversations, that the answer to the question would become inescapable, not as a dogmatic assertion, but as an invitation to look at the posed question from a fresh perspective.' Another Chicago colleague, Wendy Doniger, has spoken of his contribution to Indological studies as a 'great intellectual trapeze act' performed 'withouta net, between two worlds', the Indian and the American. Ramanujan's own view of himself was more down to earth. H e called himself the hyphen in Indo-American. Magician, trapezist, and, especially on first acquaintance, a master ofdisguise ('I resemble eve~yonelbut myself', as the early
237
'Self-Portrait' has it), A.K. Ramanujan was born in Mysore in 1929 into a family ofSrivaishnavaTami1 Brahmins. His father was a professor of mathematics, and Ramanujan grew up in a multilingual environment in which Tamil, Kannada, and English were spoken. He was educated in Mysore and Poona, and in the 1950s taught in various colleges in South India, but mainly in Belgaum. In 1958 he went to the United States to do a Ph.D. in Linguistics at Indiana University, and in 1962 was appointed to the University of Chicago, where he remained for the next thirty years. He died there under anaesthesia, during ahotched operation, in 1993. Ramanujan was. thirty-seven when The Striders (1966) was published. Thereafter like Philip Larkin's, his books of poems appeared at the rate of one per decade, Relations in 197 1 and Second Sight in 1986. When his Collected Poems came out in 1995, its fourth and last section consisted of The Black Hen, the collection he was working on and had almost completed at the time of his death. A poem in it, dated 16 March 1992, reads uncannily like a premonition: Birth rakes a long time though death can be sudden, and multiple, like pregnant deer shot down on the run . . . ('Birthdays') In the United States, however, Ramanujan, the poet, was little known. Perhaps nothing indicates this better than the doublespread illustration called Galaxy of Contemporary Poets in the Harper Anthology ofpoetry (1981). The galaxy is filled with the starry names of the poets of England and America, and though Ramanujan is one of the stars, his name appears at the very edge, a tiny dot in the bottom right corner. It was not his cunningly
Partial Recall
Looking for A.K. Ramanujan
made poems, but the five volumes of not less artfullyplotted translations from Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu, with their elaborate diagram-filled introductions and afterwords, that made Ramanujan's international reputation. They are The Interior Landscape (1967), Speaking of Siva (1973), Hymnsfor the Drowning (198 l ) , Poems ofLove and War (1985), and, with Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, When God is a Customer ( 1994). Ramanujan's other important work was in oral literature and folklore, areas he had pursued since the early 1950s. His very first book, published in 1955, had been a collection of proverbs in Kannada, and during the next forty years he wrote extensively on such subjects as 'The Indian Oedipus', 'On Folk Mythologies and Folk Puranas', and 'Who Needs Folklore? T h e Relevance of Oral Traditions to South Asian Studies', often drawing on his field notes for examples. Together with his essays on literature and culture, these have been published in Collected Essays (1999). It is only appropriate that the last book ofhis to appear in his lifetime should be Folklore of India (1991), many of whose tales he had collected himself. Left out of this account are Ramanujan's translation of U.R. Anantha Murthy's novel, Samskard (1976), and his writings in Kannada, which include three collections of verse and a novella. Indeed, it has been remarked by a Kannada poet that the only way to do justice to a bilingual writer like Ramanujan is to read his English and Kannada poems together, preferably between the covers of the same book. If Ramanujan's are some of the most eloquent translations of Indian literature available in English, it's largely because he was a not inconsiderable poet in English himself. In the running battle between the 'literalists' who believe that you can translate only if you bite off a good half of your own tongue and those for whom translation is 'to metaphor', to 'carry across', Ramanujan's position
is unambiguous. 'The ideal', he wrote in the introduction to Hymnsfor the Drowning, 'is still Dryden's, "a kind of drawing after the life"', and he says in ' O n Translating a 'Tamil Poem' that 'The only possible translation is a "free" one1:
238
239
Translations are transpositions, reenactments, interpretations. Some elements of the original cannot be transposed at all. O n e can often convey a sense of the original rhythm, but not the language-bound meter, one can mimic levels of diction, but not the actual sound of the original words. Textures are harder (maybe impossible) to translate than structure, linear order morqdifficult than syntax, lines more difficult than larger patterns. Poetry is made at all these levels-and so is translation. That is why nothing less than a poem can translate another.
George Chapman, the translator of Homer and, like Dryden, one of Ramanujan's forebears, put it thus: 'With Poesie to open Poesie'. Ramanujan separates those elements in a poem that resist translation from those that do not. Levels of diction, syntax, and phrases are the translator's points of entry. Through them he nudges his way into the material, before dyeing it, thread by thread, in the colour of his voice, one that is, like a fingerprint or signature, unique to him. No two translations of the same poem, for this reason, can sound the same. It's a way of translation; there are others. Ramanvjan is quick to caution, though, that by free translation he does not mean an untethered one. 'Yet "anything goes" will not do', he says, adding immediately afterwards, 'The translatioh must not only represent, but re-present, the original. O n e walks a tightrope between theTo-language and the From-language, in a double loyalty. A translator is "an artist on oath".' Having said this, Ramanujan once again faces in the opposite direction.
Partial Recall
Looking for A.K Ramanujan
'Sometimes', he says, 'one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it.' Clearly, the tightrope between poetry and Indology, modern English and earlyTami1, is not easily
own English poems. He was, in the early 1960s, still writing what he knew as a modernist poet reinforced his translations, what
walked. Like some of his other essays, 'On Translating a Tamil
he was learning as a translator found its way into his poems. When
Poem' ends with a parable:
Ramanujan says of the Tamil poems that often they 'unify their
240
24 1
some of the poems that were to appear in The Striders, and just as
rich and diverse associations by using a single, long, marvellously managed sentence', he could well be describing his own practice.
A Chinese emperor ordered a tunnel to be bored through a great mountain. The engineers decided that the best and quickest way to do it would be to begin work on both sides of the mountain, after precise measurements. If the measurements are precise enough, the rwo tunnels will meet in the middle, making a single one. 'But what happens if they don't meet?' asked the emperor. The counselors, in their wisdom, answered, 'If they don't meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one.'
Not only are some of his poems similarly made, but the single syntax-driven sentence can take a page or more to unfold. Ramanujan also pointed out the correspondence between the ancient Tamil poets and a modeA master like Marianne Moore. Explaining why the Tamil poets chose the kurinri flower to suggest the mood of first love, he says the choice was partly motivated by a botanical fact: 'a kurinci plant comes to flower only from
Poet-translators seem to find their chosen material almost
nine to twelve years after it is planted-this
identifies it with the
serendipitously, and Ramanujan discovered his in a library base-
tropical virgin heroine who comes to puberty at the same age.'
ment where, on one of his first Saturdays at the University of Chicago, he had gone in search of an elementary grammar of Old
'Thus is the real world', he says in the afterword to Poems ofLove
Tamil. While looking for it, he stumbled upon the Kuruntokai,
b
and War,'always kept in sight and included in the symbolic.These
one of the eight anthologies of classical Tamil ascribed to the first
poets would have made a poet like Marianne Moore happy: they are "literalists of the imagination", presenting for inspection in
three centuries CE. 'I sat down on the floor between the stacks',
poem after poem "imaginary gardens with real toads in them".'
he writes, 'and began to browse. To my amazement, I found the
But if the ancient Tamils are among Miss Moore's Borgesian
prose commentary transparent, it soon unlocked the old poems
precursors, Ramanujan is among those who learnt from her exam-
for me.' Ramanujan's translations of these poems started appearing
ple: his five-toed lizards, salamanders, quartz clocks, and poem
in American journals as early as 1964, and in 1965 Writers Work-
titles that double also as first lines can be traced to her. These and
shop, Calcutta, published a small selection, Ftfeen Poemsfiom a
other parallels, resemblances, mediations, and overlaps make his
Classical TamilAnthology.This was followed two years later by The Interior Landscape, the book which established Ramanujan's
poems and translations of a piece; they seem as two halves of an indivisible whole.
reputation as the inventor ofTamil poetry for our time. Though the influence of Ramanujan's example on the translation of Indian classics into English is yet to be assessed, there is little doubt about the ways in which the translations shaped his
For someone who published only three average-sized collections of verse in his lifetime, Ramanujan's Collected Poems surprises by
Partial Recall
Looking for A.K. Ramnnujan
its length. It runs to almost 300 pages. Its other surprise is that
through the train window.The first stanza consists ofone line, the
there are no other surprises. For instance, the allusions that seem
second of two, the third of three, and so on till the sixth. There-
to proliferate in the later work are there from the beginning. They
after, in the five remaining stanzas, the number oflines successive-
range over many disciplines-literature,
ly decreases, till we come to the last stanzawhich, like the last first,
242
anthropology, religion, folklore-and
philosophy, psychology,
from the Taittiriya Upanishad
is of one line. This is how the poem concludes:
to L.P. Hartley. This is less an indication of his reading, wide as it was, than of the way his kinship-seeking mind worked, the run-
J
. . . I see a man
When the latter happened, as in Second Sight, the result could
between two rocks. I think of the symmetry
be chilling:
of human buttocks.
on lines wiring up its different parts, or disconnecting them.
Suddenly, connections severed as in a lobotomy, unburdened of history, I lose
243
.
Having once found his style, Ramanujan saw no call to make changes, not even minor ones. His speech is consistently demotic, the stanzas inventive, the tone-in
the face of much suffering-
wry, bemused, clinical. By comparison, Larkin looks a sentimy bearings, a circus zilla spun a t the end of her rope, dizzy, terrified, and happy. And my watchers watch, cool as fires in a mirror. ('Looking for the Centre') Though several poems in Second Sight are written in the same two-and-a-half-line stanza, forming a scattered sequence, Ramanujan generally gives the poem a shape that is original to it. His poems, exquisitely crafted, are as much objects to hold between fingers as ~ r i n t e dlines to read with the eyes. A good example is 'Poona Train Window'. Its eleven stanzas are conventionally laid out in a column on the page, which is why we do not immediately pick out the underlying design, whose inspiration comes from the very part of the human anatomy Ramanujan contemplates
mentalist. T h e examples below are from The Black Hen. T h e circumstances-a
divorce, a medical investigation-belong
to a
later period ('Pain' in fact was finished weeks before his death), but the droll manner goes back to The Striders, where it was first perfected: April to June burned night and day like a temple lamp kept alive by a cripple praying for her legs and July was a t war, bombs overhead, napalm fires in the bone, children almost drowned in a flash flood of divorce papers. ('August')
244
Looking for A.K Ramanujan
Partial Recall
Just comb your hair. You shouldn't worry about Despair. Despair is a strange disease. I think it happens even to trees.
Doctors X-ray the foot, front face and back, left profile and right as if for a police file, unearth shadow fossils of neanderthals buried in this contemporary foot; they draw three test tubes of blood as I turn my face away, and label my essences with a mis-spelled name . . .
('Excerpts from a Father's Wisdom')
4
('Pain') Full of paradoxes, with also a gift for making them; often autobiographical, but seldom transparently so; tight-lipped, but fantasizing about stripping; deadly serious, but never more so than when being playful; this was Ramanujan. In 'A Poor Man's Riches 1' he refers to the colour ofhis eyes and, 'classified1 in each oblong of visa and passport', the distinguishing 'five moles' on his face. It's a face he hid behind many masks. T h e changing shapes of the mask and the face behind them are, from different angles, what he probed in poems written over four decades. Except for The Black Hen, which was put together by an eightmember committee after his death, Ramanujan's three previous collections are so arranged that each poem illuminates the one following it, and is illuminated by it in return. They are thus doubly lit, throwing unexpected shadows. In T/)e Striders, 'No Man Is an Island' and 'Anxiety' appear on facing pages. T h e former concludes, 'But this man,/ I know, buys dental floss.' and the latter 'But anxiety/ can find no metaphor to end it.' Unrelated though the two poems seem to be, they make a joint statement, which is that no amount of flossing will get rid of this thing wedged between the teeth. Ramanujan's word for it here is 'anxiety'; in his other poems it is called 'despair', 'fear', 'anger', 'madness', 'lust'. It is his major theme, even when he is writing in a minor key:
'Snakes', the second poem in The Striders, refers to this state of dread metaphorically. Our tormentors are not remote creatures we meet only in woods while taking a walk, but appear where we expect them least: in the cool of libraries, staring out of any 'book e of our homes where that has gold/ on its spine', or i n ~ h safety Sister ties her braids with a knot of tassel. But the weave of her knee-long braid has scales, their gleaming held by a score of clean new pins. I look till I see her hair again.
5
Eventually, the snake is killed-'Now/ frogs can hop upon this sausage rope1-only to live another day. It is not long in coming. In 'Breaded Fish', which is only one poem away from 'Snakes', the snake image reappears. This time it is 'a hood/ of memory like a coil on a heath', which, when it opens in the speaker's eyes, makes him see not some specially made 'breaded fish'-'a blunt-headed/ smell'-that a woman is thrusting into his mouth, but
. . . a dark half-naked length of woman, dead on the beach in a yard of cloth, dry, rolled by the ebb, breaded by the grained indifference of sand. I headed for the shore, my heart beating in my mouth.
246
Partial Recall
In a poem of twelve lines, the first eleven are one sentence. 'Others see a rush, a carnival, a million,/ why does he see nothing, or worse, just one', Ramanujan asks in 'Some People'. When the eye sees one thing and memory apprehends another, an unsuspected crevice opens up between the two, into which there is always a risk of falling. Ramanujan, who knew the risk only too well, often spoke ofthe mind's terrors in precisely such images. We find them as early as 'The Fall' in The Striders, where the poem works out a metaphor taken from parachuting, and as late as the last poem in The Black Hen, 'Fear No Fall'. 'Chicago Zen', in Second Sight, enacts all the stages of the drama and concludes on a note of mock warning: and watch for the last step that's never there. Ramanujan, however, is a poet of last steps taken, the plunge made, the descent begun. H e is all about being blinded by sight 'in unexpected places': in the middle of 'a whole milling conferencelon Delhi milk and China soyabean' in 'Some Place', and in the middle of a street in 'Chicago Zen': The traffic light turns orange on 57th and Dorchester, and you stumble you fall, into a vision of forest fires, enter a frothing Himalayan river, rapid, silent. On the 14th floor, Lake Michigan crawls and crawfs in the window. Your thumbnail cracks a lobster louse on the windowpane
Looking for A.K. Ramanujan from your daughter's hair and you drown, eyes open, towards the Indies, the antipodes. And you, always'io perfectly sane. In these episodes of blindness and sight, falling and drowning, self-mockery and the stress ofextreme experience run side by side, making it a performance by turns delightful and alarming to watch. But Ramanujan does not always pull it off, and there are times in Second Sight when he gets carried away, parodying his own act, as in 'Dancers in a Hospital', the first three sections of 'Looking for the Centre', and 'Waterfalls in a Bank'. To be all one's life both drowning 'towards . . . the antipodes' and standing firmly on dry land; to be held motionless between private grotesqueries and public mask; to exist on two planes at the same time: Ramanujan called this 'living by contraries'. Perfectly sane, though, are the poems' beginnings, giving little hint of the topsyturviness to come. Ironic, chatty, quick-witted, and full of inner rhymes, assonance, and wordplay, their breezy tone, within the space of a line, can turn into a very black storm.,They begin as routinely as 'Routine Day Sonnet' ('For me a perfectly ordinary/ day at the office'), or as innocently as nursery rhymes ('One two three four five/ five fingers to a hand'), and, like routine days and nulsery rhymes, end in catastrophe. The same pattern, more or less, is seen in 'Conventions of Despair': Yes, I know all that. I should be modern. Marry again. See strippers at the Tease. Touch Africa. Go to the movies. Impale a six-inch spider under a lens. Join the Testban, or become The Outsider.
Looking for A.K. Ramanujan
Partial Recall
248
'
249
Or pay to shake my fist
Pound. It occurs in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in a passage lament-
(or-whatever-you-calI-it) at the psychoanalyst.
ing those killed in the Great War:
And when I burn
1 should smile, dry-eyed, and nurse martinis like the Marginal Man. But, sorry, I cannot unlearn conventions of despair. They have their ride. I must seek and will find my particular hell only in my hindu mind: must translate and turn till I blister and roast for certain lives to come, 'eye-deep', in those Boiling Crates of Oil . . .
Died some, pro patria, non 'dulce' non 'et decor . . . walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies . . . (iv) 'Conventions of Despair' continues for another seven stanzas, but its point has been made, three times over. O u r 'particular hell'-or
'tiny strip1 of sky'-in
which we burn, blister, and roast,
is the one constant we have in 'a landslide of lights'. The rest is a bit of role-playing, a bit of shamming, like taking off and putting on costumes, whether ofexplorer, scientist, peacenik, or Outsider.
A poet does not bring his unruly 'little demons' under control by shaking his fist at the analyst, but by keeping a meticulous
Without breaking the offhand manner, the poem suddenly swings into its subject in the fourth stanza. Ramanujan, who loved paradoxes, conveys hell very differently in the well-known title poem of the same collection in which 'Conventions of Despair' appears: This bug sits on a landslide of lights and drowns eyedeep into its tiny strip of sky. ('The Striders') Connecting the two depictions, one done in the style of bazaar oleographs and the other a prize-winning piece of nature photography, is the phrase 'eye-deep', which itself is a tag from Ezra
record oftheir deeds in card-sized stanzas. The following entry, the sixth of eight, is from 'Entries for a Catalogue of Fears': Like any honest man, unnerved by the slightest inquiry into his flawless past, found spotted all over with horrid fact by the mere act of questioning: or found helplessly handling my thing at seventy on a doorstep wiping out a whole difficult lifetime of dignity and earning only the fascination of passing old women.
250
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II
Looking for A. K Ramanujan
As early as 'Towards Simplicity' in The Striders, Ramanujan, in what became a favourite strategy of his, had drawn the human body and the natural world into one frame:
We catch another glimpse of the man on the doorstep in 'Foundlings in the Yukon'. Written more than nventy years after 'Entries for a Catalogue of Fears', this late poem is based on a newspaper report, the discovely by miners in northwest Canada, near the Arctic Circle, of some seeds that had been 'sealed off by a landslidel in Pleistocene times' When planted, six of the seeds 'took root1 within forty-eight hours/ and sprouted1 a candelabra of eight small leaves'. These 'up-starts', Ramanujan says,
Corpuscle, skin, cell, and membrane, each has its minute seasons clocked within the bones. I
drank up sun and unfurled early with the crocuses in March as if long deep burial had made them hasty
,
for birth and season, for names, genes, for passing on: like the kick and shift of an intra-urerine memory, like this morning's dream of being born in an eaglei nesr with speckled eggs and screech of nestlings, like a pent-up centenarian's sudden burst of lust, or maybe just elegies in Duino unbound from the dark, these new aborigines biding their time for the miner's night-light to bring them their dawn . .
25 1
i l
The poem projects death as a respite 'From the complexity1 of reasons gyring within reasons', ? return, if only for a while, to 'simplicity' and 'larger, external seasons'. But whereas 'Towards Simplicity' is 'Yeatsian and schematic, like a geometrical figure, 'Foundlings in the Yukon' is many-layered, expansive, flowing. No feature of Ramanujan's emotional geography is absent from it, and yet each appears as if newly 'unfurled'. Sexual hunger, lust, the 'horrid fact' which can wipe out 'a whole difficult lifetime1 of dignity', are transformed into a metaphor for irrepressible life itself. The Pleistocene rocks in which the 'sealed off' seeds are found, the six seeds that 'took root and 'drank up sun', and the centenarian's 'pent-up' seeds, bind the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds together to make one of Ramanujan's happiest poems. Seekers after happiness, though, should turn to Ramanujan's translations. In them, he could be both himself (the skilful Modernist poet) and somebody else; could inhabit both previous centuries and his own. As he says in a late poem, 'Time moves in and out of me'. Here is an example from The Interior Landscape: WFIAI. HE SAID As a little white snake with lovely stripes on its young body
252
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troubles the jungle elephant this slip of a girl her teeth like sprouts of new rice her wrists stacked with bangles troubles me. In the ordering of its lines, the translation from the classical Tamil reminds one of some of his more inventive stanza shapes, but the resemblance ends there. Unlike the interior landscape of his poems, there is no place for razors, kitchen knives, or bandaged heads (the gruesome list could go on) in this one. But the reader looking for A.K. Ramanujan, where should he turn? To the poems, the translations, or the essays?As befits the magician he set out to be, Ramanujan can be found in the same interconnected work that he had, an instant ago, his multipb selves intact, disappeared into.
Street Music: A Brief History
T h e story of Indian literature in English, if not of Indian literature as a whole, is a story of forgetfulness. Does anyone nQwremember that one ofour finest essayists was Aubrey Menen (1912-89) who, in The Space Within the Heart, also wrote a classic autobiography? O r that there was once a poet called Nobo Kissen Ghose (1837-19 18) who, under the pseudonym of Ram Sharma, wrote poems like 'Stanzas to Lord Lytton's Infant Son' ('Tiny Hindu! When to manhood grown,/ Wilt thou love the land that gave thee birth?')? 0; that there was a journal edited by Ramananda Chatterjee called The Modern Review, to which Ezra Pound, Tagore, Jadunath Sarkar, Nehru, and Verrier Elwin contributed? What keeps a name from sinking into oblivion is a literary culture, in which universities have an obvious role to play. It's a role that Indian universities abandoned a long time ago. There is no one, as far as I know, sifting through the poetry, fiction, and essays that have appeared, since the 1800s in periodicals or in volume form and drawing parallels between past and present, or rescuing works that have unjustly been forgotten. But literatures don't wait for others to come and do their job for them. T h e writers do it themselves. It's been done in the pastby Adil Jussawalla's New Writing in India (1974), Amit Chaudhuri's The Picador Book ofModern Indian Literature (200 l), and '
254
Street Music: A Brief History
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Eunice d e Souzds Early Indian Poetry in English: 1829-1947 (2005), and the essays of Nissim Ezekiel a n d Amit Chaudhuriand it'll be done again. W h a t Andrew Field in The Complection of Russian Literature (1971) said about Russian literature of the nineteenth century is true of ours in the twenty-first:
The best that has been said and thought about Russian literature has cornefiom the left hand of Russian writers themselves. In a society in which, during their lifetimes, Count Sollogub was more popular than Nikolai Gogol and, in the 1880s, Seymon Nadson was generally declared a better poet than Pushkin, the steady voice and the keen insight into the true nature of Russian literature have always belonged to the writers themselves, passing judgement (unheeded) on their peers and predecessors. [Emphasis in original]
*
T h e bilingual poet Arun Kolatkar never wrote a critical essay but had the 'keen insight'. Asked in 1977 by a Marathi magazine who his favourite poets and writers were, h e replied, not witho u t exasperation: There are a lot of poets and writers I have liked. You want me to give you a list?Whitman, Mardhekar, Manmohan, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Kafia, Baudelaire, Heine, Catullus, Villon, Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Janabai, Eknath, Tukaram, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Han Shan, Ram Joshi, Honaji, Mandelstam, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Babel, Apollinaire, Breton, Brecht, Neruda, Ginsberg, Barth, Duras, Joseph Heller, Gunter Grass, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Nabokov, Namdev Dhasal, Patthe Bapurav, Rabelais, Apuleius, Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, Robert Shakley, Harlan Ellison, Bhalchandra Nemade, Durrenmatr, Arp, Cummings, Lewis Carroll, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Godse Bhatji, Morgenstern, Chakradhar, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Balwantbuva, Kierkegaard, Lenny Bruce, Bahinabai Chaudhari, Kabir, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters,. Leadbelly, Howling Wolf, Jon Lee Hooker, Leiber and Stoller, Larry Williams, Lightning
255
Hopkins, Andrez Wajda, Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Woody Guthrie, Laurel and Hardy. , T h e list is long enough for ageing Indian academics, scuttling between metropolis a n d periphery, to cut their milk-teeth on. O n e American scholar of Marathi, Philip Engblom, has this to say about it: ' T h e astonishing admixture (off the top of his head) n o t only of nationalities but of artistic genres (symboliste poetry to art film to Mississippi and Chicago Blues to Marathi sants) speaks volumes about the environment in which Kolatkar produced his own poetry.' A n d not just Kolatkar. In the introduction to his Anthology of Marathi Poetry: 1945-1965 (1967), in which some of Kolatkar's best known early poems like 'Woman' and 'Irani Restaurant Bombay' first appeared, Dilip Chitre writes about 'the paperback revolution' which
.
unleashed a tremendous variety o f . . . influences [that] ranged from classical Greek and Chinese to contemporary French, German, Spanish, Russian and Italian. The intellectual proletariat that was the product of the rise in literacy was exposed to these diverse influences. A pan-literary context was created.
Cross-pollination bears strange fruits. [Bal Sitaram] Mardhekar wrote books on literary criticism and aesthetic theory which make references to contacts with various European works of art and literature . . . During his formative years as a writer, he was deeply influenced by Joyce and Eliot,. and these continued to be critical influences in his critical writing throughout his career, until his untimely death in 1956. The transnational environment (or 'many-sided cosmopolitanism' in Amit Chaudhuri's phrase) is one paradigm of the literarycultural world that the Indian writer, regardless of language, has
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Street Music: A BriefHistory
inhabited for the past two hundred years. Bankimchandra
u p his books (at the rate ofabout one a day) mostly from the pave-
Chattopadhyaya, in 'A Popular Literature for Bengal' ( 1 870), was among the first to sense this: 'It is a fact that the best Bengali books
ment booksellers around Fl&a Fountain and at Strand Book Stall in Bombay. We don't know where Shoshee Chunder got his from,
are the productions of Bengalis who are highly cultivated English
but when he was growing u p Calcutta would have been awash
256
257
scholars. T h e matter for regret is how few these books are, and how
with books of all kinds, both imports and those produced locally.
few the scholars w h o have written them.' Minus the regret, but
As C.A. Bayly writes in Empire and Information (1999):
at the same time turning it into something like a nostrum, the thought was echoed a hundred years later by A.K. Ramanujan in ' O n Bharati and His Prose Poems':
s)
After the nineteenth century, no significant Indian writer lacks any of the three traditions: the regional mother-tongue, the pan-Indian (Sanskritic, and in the case of Urdu and Kashmiri, the Perso-Arabic as well), and the western (mostly English). Thus Indian modernity is a response not only to contemporary events but to at least three pasts. Poetic, not necessarily scholarly, assimilation of all these three resources in various individual ways seems indispensable. . . The malaise and feebleness of some modern Indian poetry (in English as well as in our mother-tongues) is traceable, I believe, to the weak presence or total disconnection with one or another of these three resources. The strong presence of the three is certainly not sufficient, but it is necessary. Beginning with our Ur-texts, those of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, the poems of Derozio and the prose of Kylas Chunder D u t t and Shoshee Chunder D u t t for instance, we should ask ourselves what books and ideas fed into them; what the internationalism of those times was a n d how it mixed with native literary traditions o n the one hand, ancl local sights and sounds o n the other, to create a new modernity, a new vernacular literature which now goes by the unwieldy and still hostility-inducing name of Indian literature in English. Kolatkar, who, incidentally, had taught himselfsanskrit, picked
Official and missionary activities further swelled the huge numbers of books from Britain to India, which amounted in 1839 to 1,469 cwt per annum. This matched exports to the US and British America (including the Caribbean). The b o k s may well have been missionary ephemera; they may have been designed as ships' ballast or simply have sat on library shelves in European stations. But, combined with the products of the now substantial British and Indian printing industries in Calcutta and other centres, the spread of the printed book in a subcontinent where it barely existed a generation before was a striking effect of colonial rule. In the absence of international credit cards and Amazon.com, the latest books still had a way of getting around. If you lived, as I do, in 'the interior', the 'bookwallah' rushed them to your doorstep just as FedEx does today. Bayly again: The new knowledge spread faster than the printing press. Even a petty rajah in the Banaras region had accumulated large collections of western books by the 1830s. He could not read English himself, but showed off his collection to a passing missionary as a token of his broad-mindedness. Indian merchants had already set up networks of hawkers to spread exotica and 'Europe goods' into,the interior. The 'bookwallah', or retail itinerant bookseller, soon appeared in response to the new demand for information as a commodity. Shoshee Chunder, who belonged to the distinguished D u t t family of Calcutta, is all but forgotten
by us, but in a forty-year
writing career he published poems, a three-decker bildugnsroman
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Street Music: A BriefHistory
titled The %ungZemindar ( 1883), short fiction, essays, and historical accounts, and even forayed into the new field of ethnograApart from the ethnological work The Wild Tvibes of India (1882), which he published, as he did also The YoungZemindar, under a wild pseudonym, Horatio Bickerstaffe Rowney, the only other book of his that seems to be in print is SelectionsfFom 'Bengaliana' (2005), or Bengaliana, A dish of Rice and Curry, and Other Indigestible Ingredients (1877), to a v e its original title. There are many reasons why we should read Shoshee Chunder, the pleasure afforded by his prose being not the least of them. H e had an observant mind that was interested in different things (a fox rather than a hedgehog in Isaiah Berlin's famous distinc-
reflections. The WorksofShoshee Chunder Dutt Series I , Historical andMiscellaneous was published in six volumes by Lovell Reeve in \ 1884. The following year, the year in which he died at the age of 6 1, a further four volumes appeared, The WorksofShosheeChunder Dutt Series 2, Imaginative, Descriptive, and Metrical. They remain unread. The next time we stop before a mirror, we should reflect on Shoshee's fate and perhaps see in it a description of our own. The years from 1824 (when Shoshee Chunder was born) to, roughly, 1845 (when he published 'The Republic of Orissa: A
258
tion), and though he wrote considerable quantities ofverse, prose was the medium he best expressed it in. If the Mughal emperor Babur advised his young son Humayun to avoid obfuscation in writing ('From now on write with uncomplicated, clear, and plain words'), Shoshee Chunder told his young nephew Romesh Chunder Dutt about 'independence of character and thirst for literary fame'. The idea of literary fame, which would have meant something very different when manuscripts had to be copied by hand, is linked crucially to the print culture that colonialism introduced. To see one's name in a newspaper that thousands of educated households read first thing in the morning; to see it on the spine ofa title that would continue to be available, as [he English authors were, long after one was dead: this was fame. Importantly, the large number of newspapers and journals being printed in Calcutta-almost 200 in the period 1780-1 857-led to a demand for new kinds of writing. It was an opportunity that Shoshee Chunderseized, turningout asteadystream ofreportage, autobiographical essays, opinion pieces, social commentary, and political
259
Page from the Annals of the Twentieth Century', which tells the story of an armed uprising by rhe tribal Kingaries against the British), coincided with a period of intellectual ferment that India has not known since. At its centre, although he died in 1831, was the Hindu College lecturer Henry Derozio. His ability to attract worshipful students and at the same time be the focus of intense hostility, his radical ideas and the suffering it brought him, puts one in mind of the twelfth-century French scholastic philosopher Peter Abelard. 'I was then summoned and came at once before the Council. Without any questioning or discussion they compelled me to throw my book [his treatise on theTrinity] into the fire with my own hands, and so it was burnt', Abelard writes in Historia Calamitatum. Derozio, summoned before the Hindu College Committee and accused of being a corrupter of youth, was forthwith dismissed from service. He died of cholera shortly afterwards, aged twenty-two, without having written his Historia
Calamitatum or 'The Story of His Misfortunes'. He did though send a letter to the college authorities, denying that he ever preached atheism or recommended marriages between brothers and sisters. Rut whereas Abelard and Heloise have passed into European consciousness, Derozio is hardly studied outside Bengal, and then too only by those who are interested in such arcane
260
Street Music: A BriefHistory
Partial Recall
subjects as early-nineteenth-century Indian poetry in English.
Derozio, Poet of India: The Dejnitive Edition, edited by Rosinka Chaudhuri, appeared in 2008, and while anywhere else it would have been hailed as a literary event, here the book attracted some interest in Kolkata but was otherwise ignored by the national media. If parochialism runs deep in India, literary parochialism runs deeper. Sivanath Sastri's Bengali classic Ramtanu Lahiri 0 Tatkalin
Bangasamaj (1 903) tells of Derozio's influence o n those w h o m he taught. Derozio, h e writes,
9'
introduced a new epoch in the intellectual and moral history of Bengal, and moulded, when they were boys, the character of men like Ramtanu Lahiri, Krishnamohan Banerji, Ram Krishna Mullick, Dakhinaranjan Mukerji and Ram Gopal Ghosh. Though he taught the fourth class alone, he was friendly with almost all the students of the college.
'
2 61
Most of those who had received their education in the Hindu College, and the other seminaries in Calcutta, were fired with the desire to do away with everything that was old and embrace everything that was new. 'Cast off your prejudices, and be free in your thoughts and actions,' was their watchword; and there was at the time a new force at work to foster this independent spirit. Stirring reports of the French Revolution reached their ears. Some of their English frie,nds expressed sympathy with the movement; and such works in English literature as advocated its course were placed within their reach. No wonder then that they soon became thorough revolutionists, and were resolved to lay the axe at the root of everything that savoured of ignorance and superstition. The orthodox customs of the country were run down wholesale by them; and the cry they raised was: 'Break down everything old, and rear in its stead what is new.' I ' T h e Republic of Orissa' came out of this intellectual churning; more specifically, o u t of a young literary tradition of which its author was acutely aware. Behind it lay Kylas Chunder Dutt's 'A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of theyear 1945' (1835), which for
Mr Derozio's house had a great attraction for these young lads. There they learnt much and enjoyed much. Ideas quite novel were so presented before their minds that they could easily grasp them. Not only were their intellects sharpened, but their views with regard to their moral duties too were expanded under his influence. The hitherto imprepable stronghold of prejudice and superstition was adroitly attacked by him; and Hindu lads, brought up from infancy in the belief that the society of a Christian is contaminating, and that the food touched by him or prepared in his house is so defiling as to hurl him who ate i t to the lowest depths of hell, broke asunder the shackles of caste, and freely ate with their Eurasian friend. (Translation by Roper Lethbridge)
the first time in fiction spoke about Indian Independence, projecting the year of Independence a century into the future. Kylas Chunder's story takes place in an imagined time, 1945, but the space in which it takes place is real and filled with recognizable people. Chitpore Road and the Esplanade are mentioned by name, and the 'splendidly attired' Derozian protagonist Bhoobun Mohan, addressing a meeting of rebels 'with all the learning and eloquence which the Anglo-Indian College could furnish', is a character straight out of one of the debating associations that had sprung u p all across Calcutta in the 1820s a n d 1830s. Italo Calvino says somewhere that for the fabulous to be effective
Sastri follows this with a vivid description of what it was like to
it must be g o u n d e d in a recognizable reality; before jam can be
be young in Calcutta in 1828, two years after Derozio was appointed to the college:
applied, h e says, you need to have a slice of bread first. As a practitioner of the storyteller's art, Kylas Chunder seems to have
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Street Music A BriefHistory
known this instinctively; he also seems to have passed on this knowledge to Shoshee, who was his cousin.
T h e use of the inventory (birds made of coloured rags, paperpal-
Those who have written about 'The Republic of Orissa', like
'everything in fact'), the focus on the familiar and ephemeral, the
Meenakshi Mukherjee in The Perishable Empire (2000) and
inevitable juxtapositions, are literary techniques that we asso-
Priyamvada Gopal in The Indian English Novel (2009), have
ciate more with the 'high' modernists than with a mid-nineteenth-
largely dwelt on its anti-colonial ideas, ignoring the fact that
century Indian writer whom few have heard about and fewer still
besides the vanilla flavour of nationalism there are other flavours
have read.
262
in it, reflecting the range of materials, both intellectual and commonplace, distant and near at hand, that Shoshee drew upon.
263
kees, umbrellas, trees, flowers, whistles, balloons, looking-glasses,
If 'The Street Music of Calcutta' has identifiable Indian forbears, one of them has to be Kaliprasanna Sinha's Bengali classic
house and crying ' Tootiplastic ki balti banane wala'. He was offer-
Hutom Pyancher Naksha, first published in 186 1 and translated into English as The Observant Ozul (2008). Written in demotic
ing to repair broken plastic buckets. O n other mornid&, a differ-
Bangla that uses slang liberally and is as much larded with English
ent man with a different cry offers to repair the gas hob. And in
words and phrases as Kipling's English is with Hindustani, it's a
New Delhi's Greater Kailash I once passed a man dragging two
satirical description of nineteenth-century Calcutta, particularly
long strips of bamboo behind him, crying 'Naali saaf kara lo',
during the time ofits festivals and pujas, when the city, as it were,
Get your blocked drains cleaned. I've been hearing street cries for
lets its hair down. By turning his shrewd eye on Calcutta's polyg-
as long as I can remember, but I began to hear them more keenly
lot citizens, the new breed of urban Bengalis, the more fashion-
after coming across, in Bengaliana, 'The Street Music ofcalcutta'.
le and wearing their able among them dressed in ~ i n e a ~ pchapkans
It records thirty-two street cries, each followed by a wry comment.
hair Albert-style, eating 'rolls' instead of 'coarse rotis', Kaliprasanna
Here is one:
gives us a composite picture of the restless, fast-changing metro-
One morning in Allahabad, I saw a man standing outside my
polis itself. We meet roguish men who are out to make a fast buck TOOK-TAP,TOOK-TOOM
off those who've already made a fast buck (one vet treated malaria
Play-things to sell! What a crowd of ragged children follow in the wake of the seller; all anxious to buy, but having no pice to pay! And what a variety of nicknacks the man has got; birds made of coloured rags and decked with tinsel, paperpalkees,gharries, umbrellas, trees, flowers, whistles, bells, cards, balloons, looking-glasses; everything in fact, that is likely to catch a child's fancy. With villainous pertinacity these are displayed ostentatiously at every door. In vain the mothers tell the man to pass on, not having the pice to pay for what their children clamorously ask for. The man knows that the pice will be forthcoming, and generally succeeds in getting i t out.
fever by boring holes into his patients' nostrils 'as if they were bulls'); women, significantly, are absent from the city ofsin unless they happen to be whores or shrews; the streets resound with the cries of hawkers and peddlers. T h e cries tell you a lot about the Calcutta of the time, from the price offish to what the people were reading: 'The [compartment] doors shut with a loud thud. Muslim boys went around hawking the daily papers: "Want The Harkam, Sir?" "The Daily News, Sir?" Chachas with coarse red stoles slung over
264
Pizrtial Recall
their shoulders went around selling books-"Novels,
Street Music: A Brief History good novels!"
Tununang, tununang, the bells sounded again.'
T h e chapter from which this extract is taken, 'The Railways', could well be the earliest description in Indian literature of travelling by this revolutionary mode of transport. We don't know which 'good novels' the chachas (which is Hindustani for uncle; being mostly Muslim, the hawkers were addressed as chachas) were selling in 1861, but the demand for them was steady enough for A.H. Wheeler & Co. to launch from Allahabad in 1888 the Indian Railway Library. Its first six titles, all priced at one rupee, were by Kipling. Even forebears have forebears. One of the books Bankim praises in 'Bengali Literature' (1871) is Hutom Pyancher Naksha, which he describes as 'a collection of sketches of city-life, something, after the manner of Dickens' Sketches by Roz, in which the
265
This is the city at evening. 'In the morning', Bankim says, 'the scene is changed': Ding-dong, ding-dong, sounds the clock in the Church. It is four in the morning, and night-wandering Babus have turned their faces homewards. Oorya Brahmins are at work o n the flour-mills. Streetlamps are growing faint. Light breezes are blowing. Quails are singing in the verandas of the night-houses. But for this, or when the crows begin to caw, or a street dog occasionally barks for want of something else to do, the city is still silent.
It's a pity that Bankim did not
rans slate more Bangla prose. As
for the collocation of morning time, crow, street dog, and city, we shall encounter it again in Arun Kolatkar. Kaliprasanna Sinha and Shoshee Chunder Dutt were not the only people, in the mid nineteenth century, who were listening to
follies and peculiarities of all classes, and not seldom of men actu-
and recording street cries. Some of their older contemporaries like the journalist and writer Henry Mayhew (1812-87) in London
ally living, are described in racy vigorous language, not seldom disfigured by obscenity.' Bankim, like Marianne Moore, understood
and the colonial lexicographer S.W. Fallon (1817-80) in the districts of North India were doing so too. Shoshee hasn't left us
that the best form of criticism is quotation. In the same essay, he translates a longish 'scene' from Hutom, one that hums with a
a list of his favourite poets and writers, but had he been asked for
variety of street music: Fishwomen in the decaying Sobha Bazar market are selling-lamps in hand-their stores of putrid fish and salted hilstr, and coaxing purchasers by calling out. 'You fellow with the napkin o n your shoulder, will you buy some fine fish?' 'You fellow with a moustache like a broom, will you pay four annas?' Some one, anxious to display his gallantry, is rewarded by hearing something unpleasant of his ancestors. Smokers of madat and ganjah, and drunkards who hme drunk their last pice, are bawling out, 'Generous men, pity a poor blind Brahman,' and so procure the wherewithal for a new debauch.
one it would have been as long, as revealing, and as cosmopolitan as the one that Kolatkar gave his Marathi interviewer. If Shoshee Chunder was the proto-flineur of Indian literature, Kolatkar is surely its flineur incarnate. In the hundred and more years that separate them, the Calcutta toy seller's gentle 'took took' had become the Boomtown Lepers' Band's 'boom boom': Traap a boom chaka shh chaka boom tap Ladies and gentlemen (crash), here comes (bang), here comes (boom) here comes the Boomtown Lepers' Band,
Partial Recall
266
drumsticks and maracas tied to their hands bandaged in silk and the finest of gauze, and clutching tambourines in scaly paws. Traap a boom chaka shh chaka boom tap Whack. ('The Boomtown Lepers' Band')
A few weeks before he died in September 2004, as we were on our way by taxi from Prabhadevi where he lived to Cafk Military, Kolatkar, looking out of the taxi window and then at me, remarked on his English and Marathi oeuvres. With the exception of Sarpa Satra, he said, his stance in 'the boatride', jejuri, and Kala Gboda
Poems (in which 'The Boomtown Lepers' Band' appears) had been that of an observer; he was on the outside looking in. H e wondered whether he'd have gone on writing the same way if he'd lived for another ten years. T h e Marathi books, o n the other hand, were all quite different, he said, and there was no obvious thread connecting Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita, Chirimiri, and Bhijki Ehi. But there's something else, too, that links 'the boatride', Jejuri, and Kala Ghoda Poems. Each of them is arranged in the cyclic shape of the Ouroboros, their last lines suggestingly leading to their opening ones. Jejuri begins with .'daybreak' and ends with the 'setting sun/ large as a wheel'. Similarly, Kala Ghoda Poems begins with a 'traffic island' 'deserted early in the morning' and
Street Music: A Brief History
267
Kala Ghoda Poems opens with a morning scene similar to the one quoted above from Hutom Pyancher Naksha, but seen through the narrowed eyes of a pi-dog: This is the time of day I like best, and this the hour when I can call this city my own; when I like nothing better than to lie down here, at the exact centre of this traffic island (or trisland as I call it for short, ' and also to suggest a triangular island with rounded corners) that doubles as a parking lot on working days, a corral for more than fifty cars, when it's deserted early in the morning, and I'm the only sign of intelligent life on the planet; the concrete surface hard, flat and cool against my belly, my lower jaw at rest on crossed forepaws; just about where the equestrian statue of what's-his-name must've stood once, or so I imagine.
ends with the 'silence of the night', the 'traffic lights' 'like illstarred lovers/ fated never to meet'. In 'the boatride', the boat
('Pi-dog 1')
jockeys 'away/ from the landing' and returns to the same spot
As the pi-dog wakes up, the city of Bombay emblematized on its
when the ride is over. It will fill up with tourists and set off again,
body ('I look a bit like/ a seventeenth-century map of Bombay1
just as the state transport bus in Jejuri, at the end of the 'bumpy
with its seven islands// not joined yet, shown in solid black/ on
ride', will deliver a fresh batch of 'live, ready to eat' pilgrims to the
a body the colour of old parchment'), 'Mr Crow' prepares to build his nest:
temple priest.
Partial Recall A twig! A twig! A twig! A twig! A twig! You got it! You got it! You got it! It's all yours, now.
Street Music: A Brief History skip a few thousand years and pick up a work of science fantasy -Harlan Ellison's 'A Boy and his Dog' . . . ('Pi-dog 5 ' )
YOUcan take it away any time you want. But first, examine it.
Located in the vestibule of the David Sassoon Library and Reading Room, across the road from where that colonial relic, 'the equestrian statue/ of what's-his-name' stood (it's the statue of
Bite it. Is it going to bite you back? Pick it up and drop it down.
EdwardVII and has been removed 'to the zoo'), is the statue of 'the merchant prince/ of Bombay', David Sassoon. H e is a flaneur carved in stone, observing Kala Ghoda from the pedestal, much as Kolatkar, with an unobstructea view of the traffic island and
Caw! ('To a Crow') By the time you get to the end of the book, a procession of characters, drawn from all points ofthe compass, from 'Bandagere/ in Andhra Pradesh' t o 'a smokehouse in Alaska', has passed through Kala Ghoda. Kolatkar's vision is inclusive, so while Kala G h o d a is a specific place, it is also all places, just as, half asleep 'at the exact centre/ of the traffic island', the pi-dog is a specific dog and at the same time it is all dogs: O n my father's side the line goes back to the dog that followed Yudhish thira on his last journey, and stayed with him till the very end'.
seemingly idling away the hours, did from the vantage-point of his favorite restaurant, Wayside Inn:
I find myself cast in a role I detest; that of an observer, a spectator, reduced to making faces, rolling his eyes, and sticking his tongue out occasionally at this city that gets more and more unrecognizable with every passing year. ('David Sassoon 7') Earlier, in 'David Sassoon 3', Kolatkar gives us the year of Sassoon's death, 1867, as well as the year in which he wrote the poem, 1985. H e smiled mischievously when he told m e that both dates were 'according to the Hebrew calendar':
To find a more moving instance of man's devotion to dog, we have to leave the realm of history,
I died in the year, let me see now, was it five thousand six hundred and twenty-four?
270
Partial Recall
-according to the Hebrew calendar, of course. And what year is this now? Five thousand seven hundred and fortysix or something? Good lord, has it been that long since I had a fuck?
'All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena,' Baudelaire wrote in 'The Salon of 1846', 'have within them something eternal and something transitory-an absolute and a particular element. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is nothing but an abstract notion, creamed off from the general surface of different types of beauty.' In a later essay, 'The Painter of Modern Life', which, though it is on Constantin Guys, can in fact be read as a gloss on K~latkar'swork, Baudelaire hrther refined the idea, associating the 'transitory' with the 'modern': 'Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.' By giving 'Five thousand seven hundred and forty-/ six or something?' as the answer to his question, 'And what year is this now?' Kolatkar, the observer of the city, the flAneur, was nailing the 'modern', the 'contingent', leaving the other half, 'the eternal and the immovable', to look after itself.
Kolatkar never sent out his poems to magazines, or, for that matter, his books to ~ublishers,of whom he had a lifelong dread. The occasional poem that appeared in a magazine-damn you, Dionysus, Poetry India, Kavi, ChandrabhZgZ-was invariablysomething that an editor had solicited. One by one, these little magazines shut down, leaving a vacuum that is still unfilled.
Street Music: A BriefHistory
27 1
Before it appeared in Bengaliana, 'The Street Music of Calcutta' had come out in Mookerjee?Magazine. Edited by Sambhu Chandra Mukhopadhyaya, this remarkable journal, like The Modern Review and so much else, has been forgotten by Indian literature. Modelled partly on Gentleman? Magazine, in much the same way that Civil Lines was modelled on Granta, it said in the Prospectus that announced the magazine's New Series in 1872: 'Our Magazine . . . will be a receptacle of all descriptions of knowledge and literature, Poetry, the Drama, firs de sociPtP, Criticism, Prose Fiction, Sketches, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology, Political Economy, Cornmeice and Banking, Jurisprudence and ~ a &Science , and Art, History and Biography, Antiquities, Geography, Travels, Oriental Literature, Manners and Customs, Sporting, in the manifold forms of story, song, sketch, essay, causerie, &c,' Essays like 'The Street Music of Calcutta' and 'Bengali Literature' might not have been written had receptive journals like Mookerjee?Magazine and Calcutta Review not been around. Incidentally, a frequent contributor of verse to Mookerjeei Magazine was Ram Sharma. All things considered, the Indian writer in 20 10, though successful as never before, is far worse off than he was in the 1870s. It's just as well that he's unaware of the paradox.
What is an Indian Poem? 'cordin to my rules listen baby i get paid when i say so
What is an Indian Poem? Here are two poems. The language of the first, which I have transcribed in the Roman alphabet, is not English. However, it
T h e language (it is more a patois) of the first poem is BombayHindi; of the translation American English. Both poems are by Arun Kolatkar; 'main manager ko bola', which was written in 1960, is part of a sequence of three poems, all written in the same patois. The sequence, which does not have a title, first appeared
uses English words-'manager', 'company', 'rule', 'table', 'police', 'complaint'-that readers will recognize. If one keeps only the English words and erases the rest, the poem will resemble a Sap-
the sequence 'Three Cups of Tea'. Occasionally, Kolatkar trans-
phic fragment.
lated his Marathi poems into English, but he mostly kept the two
main manager ko bola mujhe pagaar mangta hai manager bola company ke rule se pagaar ek tarikh ko milega uski ghadi table pay padi thi maine ghadi uthake liya aur manager ko police chowki ka rasta dikhaya bola agar complaint karna hai to karlo mere rule se pagaar ajhee hoga The second poem is a translation of the first: i want my pay i said to the manager you'll get paid said the manager but not before the first don't you know the rules? coolly I picked up his wrist watch that lay on his table wanna bring in the cops i said
in a Marathi little magazine and subsequently, in 1977, in Kolatkar's first collection of Marathi pokms. In English, Kolatkar titled
separate. Sometimes he wondered what the connection between them was, or if there was any connection at all. Kolatkar created two very different bodies of work, both of equal distinction and importance, in two languages. T h e achievement, I think, has few parallels in world literature. What has a parallel, at least in India, is that he drew, in his work, on a multiplicity of literary traditions. H e drew on the Marathi of course, and Sanskrit, which he knew; he drew on the English and American traditions, specially Black American music and speech (' 'cordin to my rules/ listen baby/ I get paid when is say so'); and he drew on the European tradition. H e drew o n a few others besides. As he said in an interview once, talking about poets, 'Anything might swim into their ken.' Fortunately, in Kolatkar's case, we know something about that 'Anything'. While going through his papers in Bombay, after his death in September 2004, I came across a typed sheet in which he had put down a chronology of his life. In it, against each year, he gave the name of the advertising agency he worked for at the
274
What is an Indian Poem?
Partial Recall
time (Ajanta, National, Press Syndicate); the area of Bombay he lived in (Malad, Sion, A Road); illnesses, if any; and the poems he wrote, both English and Marathi. That is how we know when he wrote 'main manager ko bola'. He also gave the names of the authors he read that year. Against 1965, he mentions the following: 'Snyder, Williams, Villon, Lautreamont, Catullus, Belli, Apollinaire, Morgenstern, Berryman, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Li Po, Cold Mountain'. Cold Mountain is not the name of an author but the title of a book of translations of the Chinese poet Han Shan, whom, incidentally, Gary Snyder also translated. 'Art', Ezra Pound said, 'does not exist in a vacuum.' And Claude Lkvi-Strauss, 'Whether one knows it or not, one never walks alone along the path of creativity.' Kolatkar's list of authors, which appears to be random, is in fact a capsule biography, a life of the life of the mind. Show me your books and 1'11 tell you who you are. It's a mind that could move with ease from first-century BCE Italy to eighth century China to fifteenth-century France to twentieth-century America, while at the same time picking up the language spoken in the backstreets of Bombay, a slice of which he offers, without comment, in 'main manager ko bola'. But that said, the names of poets that appear in the list are not in themselves surprising. We were all reading the same or similar things in Bombay (or Allahabad) in 1965. There is, however, one exception, and that is Belli. Though his name belongs among the greatest in nineteenthcentury European literature, he is known to very few, even in Italy. In the mid 1960s, there was only one English translation of this poet around, and it's the one Kolatkar must have read. The translation is by Harold Norse and is called The Roman Sonnets of G.G. Belli. It has a preface by William Carlos Williams (a name that also figures in Kolatkar's list) and an introduction by Alberto
,
275
Moravia. It was published by Jonathan Williams in 1960. What is striking about Harold Norse's translation is the idiom in which he translates rornanesco, the Roman dialect, perhaps not unlike Bombay-Hindi, in which Belli wrote his sonnets. Here is the opening sentence of Williams' preface: Gogol wanted to do the job, and D.H. Lawrence, each into his own language but they were written not into the classic language Italian that scholars were familiar with, but the Roman dialect that gave them an intimate tang which was their major charm and which the illustrious names spoken of above.could not equal. Coming to Norse's translation, Williams says These translations are not made into English but into the American idiom in which they appear in the same relationship facing English as the original Roman dialect does to classic Italian.
I
'Three Cups ofTed first appeared in Saleem Peeradina's anthology Contemporary Indian Poetry in English in 1972. The anthology was the first to represent the new Indian poetry in English and 'Three Cups ofTea' has been a part of the canon since. I don't have a date for when Kolatkar made the translation, but I suspect it was made after 1965, which is after his discovery of Norse's Belli and the American demotic Norse employs to translate romanesco: 'If ya wanna be funny, it's enough to be/ A gentleman.' So there'it is, your Indian poem. It was written in a Bombay patois by a poet who otherwise wrote in Marathi and English. It then became part of two literatures, Marathi and Indian English, but entered the latter in a translation made in the American idiom, one ofwhose sources, or, ifyou will, inspirations, was an American translation of a nineteenth-century Roman poet.
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them, a Brahmin widow once accompanied her father on a pilgrimage to the shrine of a famous ascetic. To reward her devotion, the ascetic prayed that she be blessed with a son. The prayer was
Translating Kabir
answered but there was one problem: Brahmin widows are not supposed to get pregnant and she had to abandon the infant. The wife of a weaver, who was passing that way, discovered the child and took him home. The child was Kabir.
Very little is known about Kabir, outside what can be culled from
Other legends presented Kabir as a diehard rebel. It is said that
his poems, or from hagiographies and legends. According to the
Kabir chose to spend his last days not in Benares, the holiest of
latter, Kabir lived for 120 years, from 1398 to 1518. Modern
holy Hindu places, a city that promises salvation to all those who
scholars, however, take a more realistic view, but are divided
die there and where he had lived ill his life, but in an obscure town
whether he was active in the first or the second halfof the fifteenth
called Maghar, a place that from ancient times has been associat-
century. Kabir (whose name is a Qur'anic title of Allah meaning
ed first with Buddhists, and later with Muslims and the lower
'great') was born in Benares in a Muslim family recently converted
castes. 'He who dies in Maghar is reborn as an ass' Kabir says in
to Islam. The family belonged to the Julaha-or
one poem, expressing a popular belief. The move to Maghar has
weaver-caste,
and it is safe to assume that the chief reason for the conversion
a clear message: the place of one's death is of no consequence;
was its low status in the Hindu social system.
salvation can be found anywhere. It was Kabir's last act ofdefiance.
There are occasional references to the family ~rofessionin
Kabir's distaste of humbug can remind you of Diogenes. H e
Kabir's poems. In one poem in particular, addressed to his anxious
was born in a Muslim household, but poured scorn on their qazis,
mother, he talks of dismantling his loom because; he says, he
or lawgivers, at every opportunity. He had Hindu followers, but
cannot both thread the shuttle a n d hold the thread of that
reserved his sharpest barbs for pundits. In the end, he slipped
supreme reality which he called Rama or Hari, in his hand. Some-
through the fingers of both Islam and Hinduism. A famous story
one who is the lord ofthree worlds, he says, is not going to let them
tells how, following his death, both Hindu and Muslim mobs laid
starve. Kabir was married and had a son and daughter; perhaps
claim to his body. The Hindus were adamant to cremate and the
two sons and two daughters.
Muslims to bury him, but when they removed the shroud they
Kabir's hagiographers, who have been around since c. 1600,
found instead ofthe cadaver a heap offlowers.The two communities
approve neither of his marriage (they would prefer him to be celi-
peacefully divided the flowers and performed Kabir's last rites,
bate) nor, indeed, of his lowly origin, and over the years various
each according to its custom. But the legends do not end here.
accounts of his life were concocted to provide him with, among
When Kabir arrived in heaven, he was received by the four great
other things, a better pedigree. The legends however ended up
Hindu gods, Brahma, Siva, Vishnu, and Indra. Delighted to see
highlighting precisely what they were meant to conceal. In one of
him, they asked him to make himself at home. Indra even got up
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Translating Kabir
from his throne and offered it to Kabir. 'Vishnu said: "My heaven is yours. Live here forever. This is my wish."' And so it was that the
weaver. Not content to worship him from a distance, he wanted to taste God, that 'chemical called Ram', on his tongue. The poet-
crackpot weaver of Benares who had derided Hindu religious
saint could, of course, also be a woman, as Janabai, who was a
practices all his life was on the road to being deified himself. Kabir is part of the larger devotional turn known as the bhakti
maidservant, was. Bhakti is derived from the Sanskrit root bhaj,
278
movement. Described by A.K. Ramanujan as a 'great many-sided shift . . . in Hindu culture and sensibility', its distinguishing feature was an inward love for the O n e Deity, in disregard of, often in opposition to, religious orthodoxies and social hierarchies. T h e degree and nature of opposition varied, but it was never wholly absent. T h e antagonism could at times be to one's family, if it stood in the way of the devotee's union with God. As Janabai, the thirteenth-century poet-saint from Maharashtra, says in Arun Kolatkar's translation, 'god my darling1 do me a favour and kill my mother-in-law'.
279
and one of its meanings is 'to serve, honour, revere, love, adore'. The bhakta, the 'devotee' or 'lover of God', looks upon God with a certain intimacy. It was a relationship based not on ritual but romance, and it has its sensual, erotic side: Lying beside you, I'm waiting to be kissed. But your face is turned And you're fast asleep.
.
KG 19" O f all bhakti poets, of whom there were many and who wrote
Bhakti began in South India, in the country of the Tamils, in
in different languages (Tamil, Kannada,Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati,
the sixth century CE but over time acquired a pan-Indian charac-
Kashmiri, Assamese, Oriya, Avadhi), Kabir is the most outspoken. H e is ever ready to engage the reader, to harangue him, to-if it
ter. It moved to Karnataka in the tenth and Maharashtra in the twelfth century, but it was in North India, betwdn the fifteenth
came to that-wrestle
him to the ground and shout in his ear:
and seventeenth centuries, where it found perhaps its fullest expression. Bhakti favoured the informal over the formal, the spontaneous over the prescribed, and the vernacular over Sanskrit. In a well-known verse, Kabir compared Sanskrit, the language of the
Friend, You had one life And you blew it.
gods and the preserve of Brahmins, to kupajal, the stagnant water of a well, and bhasha (vernacular, in which the bhakti poets sang) to the running water of a stream. With bhakti, it has been said, a 'new kind of person or persona [came] into fashion
. . . a person who flouts proprieties, refuses
Those who are not Devotees of Ram Should be in Sing Sing Or been stillborn.
the education of a poet, insists that anyone can be a poet-for it is the Lord who sings through one' (A.K. Ramanujan). This new person, the poet-saint, could be a king or prime minister or a low-caste cobbler, tailor, barber, cotton-carder, boatman, or
*The numbers given after 'KG' refer to Parasnarh Tiwari, ed., Kabirgranthavali, Allahabad, 196 1.
280
Partial Recall
Try though you may, Neither punditry, Nor penance, Nor telling beads Will bring you To the four-armed god.
A Kabir poem has no time to waste; it hits the ground running. And yet, despite the thousands of poems ascribed to Kabir, not one can be attributed to him with certainty. His is a collective voice so individual that it cannot be mistaken for anyone else's.
If the historical Kabir is elusive, the authentic Kabir text is even more so. Since no manuscript of Kabir's poems that goes back to his lifetime has ever been found, the Kabir corpus, necessarily, is not about a single text but families of texts, of which there are three: the Bijak or 'eastern' tradition, the Rajasthani or 'western' tradition, and the Punjabi tradition centred around the Adi Granth, the sacred book of the Sikhs. With the exception of the Bijak, which is considerably smaller, all the other texts associated with these traditions are Norton-sized (and Norton-like) anthologies, drawing on the work of more than one poet. The Pancvani, or 'Songs of the Five', is an early collection from the 'western' tradition. The earliest Pancvani recension we know of is from 16 14. It has over 1000 songs-by Dadu (1 544-1603), Kabir, Namdev (c. 1270-1350), Raidas (c. 1450-1 520), and Hardas (joruit c.l600?)-clustered around different ragas. T h e Kabir padas in the recensions vary in number from 348 to 393. The same ones do not recur in all the recensions, and even when they do
Translating Kabir
28 1
there are variations between them. Somepadas, like KG 6 2 ('Easy, friend./ What's the fuss about?'), are found in all three traditions-the Bijak, the Rajasthani, and the Adi Grantb. Its Bijak and Adi Grantb versions, however, have only one line in common. This is not unusual, but it makes Kabir's textual history a minefield, 'one of the most complex to be associated with a single author in world literature' (Vinay Dharwadker). Two distinct translation practices have emerged from that minefield. T h e first is that of scholars, pioneered by Charlotte Vaudeville, whose Kabir was published by Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1974, followed by Linda Hess, Nirmal Dass, and Vinay Dharwadker. Their translations closely follow the printed text. 'In each rendering', Dhanvadker writes in a translator's note to Kabir: The Weaver; Songs, 'one verse paragraph in English represents one verse in the original.' T h e other, older practice of translation is one that, ifnot always wittingly, responds to and illuminates the performative improvisatory tradition out ofwhich the songs arose and by which they have been transmitted. These are the translations best known to the general reading public, the Kabir of Ezra Pound, Tagore, and Robert Bly. Pound's Kabir, ten poems that first appeared in Ramananda Chatterjee's The Modern Review in 19 13, comes out of literal versions provided by Kali Mohan Ghose, and Bly's comes out of Tagore's widely-read One Hundred Poems of Kabir, which was first published in 1914 and has been in print since. T h e story I will now tell helps to illuminate the complicated and suggestive ways by which Kabir's songs have been communicated even in relatively recent times. In Allahabad where I live, there are two tall crumbling gateposts opposite the university's senate house, their red bricks showing and several of them missing, with a rusty semi-circular sign on which BELVEDERE
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Translating Kabir
PRINTING WORKS is written in barely visible letters. An unpaved lane leads from the road to a colonial bungalow at the back. One part of it houses the printing works; in the other the current owners live. In the 1880s, Belvedere House stood in what was then a much more extensive compound. Kipling lived in Belvedere House in 1888, when the house belonged to Edmonia Hill and her husband Samuel Alexander Hill, professor of science at Muir Central College, and some ofhis most famous stories, such as 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep', were written there. In 'Rikki-Tikki-Tavi' he describes its 'large garden, only half cultivated, with bushes as big as summer-houses of Marshal Niel roses, lime and orange trees, clumps of bamboos, and thickets of high grass.' Kipling incidentally was also familiar with Kabir, whom he associated with religious tolerance, and composed a song in his name for the Second]ungle Book :
of North Indian poet-saints, and an initial selection of Kabir in 1907 was followed by eight more. Clearly they found a ready market, and though it's a hundred years now since they first apeared they remain in print. Tagore's translations were based on Kshiti Mohan Sen's fourpart compilation of 19 10- 11. There are, in the Sen compilation, 341 Kabir poems in all. Apart from providing the Hindi original, Sen gives each poem also in the Bengali script, followed by a paraphrase in Bengali. Sen had collected the poems on his own, but he was also familiar with the printed editions, including Prasad's. Almost all the poems in Tagore's One Hundred Poems of Kabir are also found in one form or another in two of the Belvedere Press Kabir volumes. In his preface, Sen says that he compared the poems he came across in Prasad and in other printed sources with the oral versions and the handwritten notes of singers on which he had been working for many years, first in Benares and later at different places in North India. 'From my different readings,' he writes
282
Now the white road to Delhi is mat for his feet, The sal and the kikar must guard him from heat; His home is the camp, and the waste, and the crowdHe is seeing the Way as bairagi avowed!
-.
He has looked upon Man, and his eyeballs are clear (There was 0'ne; there is One, and but One, saith Kabir); The Red Mist of Doing has thinned to a cloudHe has taken the Path for bairagi avowed!
Around 1903 the Belvedere Press was set up on the grounds of Belvedere House by Baleshwar Prasad. Prasad is an obscure figure. His descendants still run the Belvedere Printing Works, but not even they know when he was born or when he died, though he appears to have been active some time between 1876 and 19 16. He was a teacher in Benares, a Hindi journalist, and he translated Shakespeare's plays into Urdu, before moving to Allahabad and becoming a publisher. Prasad brought out a series of collections
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I chose those that accorded most with what were being sung by the practitioners and which they and I judged to be true to the tradition. I need hardly add that from the variety of advices I got, I had to choose. The sadhaks [adepts] often articulate things that fit their own times. And the same poems have different versions, and sometimes there are versions that could be understood easily only at the times when they were first composed. I had to take note of all these concerns in making my edited collection of Kabir's poems. [Translation by Amartya Sen] Prasad, for his part, provides few details of the sources of his Kabir. Various Kabir Panthi mahants, or the superiors of monasteries of the sect devoted to Kabir, sent him old manuscripts from cities in the Punjab. He may have also consulted a few undated
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Translating Kabir
modern manuscripts in Benares. Another of his sources was the oral tradition, sung variants of verses in the Bijak. Both editors in any case, true to the devotional and improvisatory origins of the songs, make choices, as Sen rightly says that had n o choice but to, and these inevitably reflect their own interest in and understanding of the tradition. As a member of the Radhasoami sect, which believes in the supremacy of a living guru, he replaced the words used for addressing God-Kabir's Rama and Hari-with guru and gurudev. Sen's edition lacks theguru words, instead including ones for love. Sometimes it is impossible to tell whether a change-the same stanzas, for example, will appear in both editions but in different orders-reflects different sources or the editor's individual preference, in Sen's case the primacy he accorded the oral tradition, the songs 'sung by the practitioners'. Be that as it may, it was the Sen edition that Tagore drew on and that later became the source of several European- and Asianlanguage translations of Kabir, one of them made by Czeslaw Milosz into Polish and subsequently translated back into English by Milosz and Robert Hass. T h e English mystic Evelyn Underhill introducedTagore's translation, which she is credited with having helped to prepare, with the assurance that Sen
more authoritative editions, beginning with Parasnath Tiwari's
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landmark Kabir-granthavali of 1961, o n which I have based my own translations, there is a sense in which there can be no authoritative edition of the work of this supremely anti-authoritarian master, who is present in the many manifestations of his work through a kind of infinite regress.
As with the Kabir text, so with this Kabir translation; it is made keeping the text's inclusive geniws in mind. Though not from the Pancvani, mohi tohi lagi kaise chutte is from the 'western' tradition. Given below are its opening lines in three translations: How could the love between Thee and me sever? As the leaf of the lotus abides on the water: so thou art my Lord, and I am Thy servant. As the night-bird Chakor gazes all night at the moon: so Thou art my Lord and I am Thy servant. (Tagore) Why should we two ever want to part?
has gathered from many sources-sometimes from books and manuscripts, sometimes from the lips of wandering ascetics and minstrels-a large collection of poems and hymns to which Kabir's name is attached, and carefully sifted the authentic songs from the many spurious works now attributed to him. These painstaking labours alone have made the present undertaking possible. Separating the authentic from the spufious in Kabir is a hopelessly tangled affair and Underhill may have somewhat missed the point. While it is obviouslyimportant now to have the substantially
Just as the leaf of the water rhubarb lives floating on the water, we live as the great one and the little one. As the owl opens his eyes all night to the moon, we live as the great one and the little one.
Separate us? Pierce a diamond first.
Partial Recall We're lotus And water, Servant And master. My love for you Is no secret.
Translating Kabir
