The One About Nissim and Shivaji

(First published in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, JANUARY 13, 2004)

In Iris, John Bayley's memoir of his wife, Iris Murdoch, he wrote of her post-Alzheimer self: "The power of concentration has gone, along with the ability to form coherent sentences.... She does not know she has wrotten twenty-seven remarkable novels, as well as her books on philosophy; received honorary doctorates from the major universities; become a Dame of the British Empire." The woman who wrote some of the most carefully turned sentences in the language could now be amused by a silly rhyme about Mary and her bear behind.
Alzheimer's, never a kind affliction, often seems far worse when it strikes writers: it takes away all memory of the work that formed their lives, and reduces language, the backbone of their very selves, to infantile babble, or to a set of stock phrases. Perhaps that's why Jerry Pinto wrote in his obituary of Nissim Ezekiel, who died at the age of 80 last Friday after surviving several years with Alzheimer's: "The onset of Alzheimer's meant that we, Mumbai, its poets, his friends and I lost him by degrees." And it was hard to recognise the poet of Island, the Bene Israel Jew who hymned Mumbai in lines both plain and ornate, the man who brought Indian English into the stilted world of poetry here, in the quiet figure I met several years ago who could cope with commonplaces but little else.
Ezekiel's reputation as a poet has waned over the years; he is seen by a generation that has replaced his pioneering spirit with a brassy chutzpah as an anachronism, a statue in front of which one genuflects absentmindedly, before passing on to other things. It would be terribly sad if he was remembered solely by 'The Night of the Scorpion', which was inflicted on generation upon generation of innocent schoolchildren: it is not a bad poem by any means, but I never saw it quite the same way after I came across this two-line parody: "I remember the night/ My mother bit the scorpion..."
In his biography of Ezekiel, R Raj Rao unearthed a rare political poem. Ezekiel was an experimental man-he approached travel, relationships and LSD in much the same spirit of detached curiosity-but not by any means politically engaged. 'Toast' was published by Kavi India in a special issue dedicated to the Emergency and appears not to have been anthologised. It speaks as much to our times as any contemporary poem:
"To those in power/ beyond the law,/ And those in prison,/ with no recourse to it,/ I drink a glass/ of this or that--/ it tastes/ like poisoned mud."
"A cheerful company/ downs the drink with me:/ it doesn't complain./ Its testament/ is silence: the new creeds,/ faces, voices serve/ the old cause of self/ as well as the older lot."
"Another drink,/ the same toast,/ Let others fight/ for you know what."



* * *

'Toast' could have been written for James W. Laine, the author of Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. As scholars across India began to assess the exact amount of the damage done at the Bhandarkar Institute in Pune, the enormity of the destruction pushed the issues raised by the Laine affair into the background. The Sambhaji Brigade activists who mobbed the Institute last week were ostensibly protesting against a section in Laine's book on Shivaji's parents. They zeroed in on the Institute on the most specious of grounds: one of its members, SH Balukar, had been named by Laine in the acknowledgements. The Institute says that thousands of books have been destroyed-perhaps 30,000 manuscripts have also been lost, not to mention, ironically, rare books on and portraits of Shivaji himself. The property destroyed includes icons of Ganesha and Saraswati, a case of religious zealots committing the exact acts of desecration they have condemned in others.
But why was Laine's book so controversial in the first place? It was published by OUP in 2003 and received fairly good reviews in academic journals and mainstream newspapers many months before trouble erupted. The Sambhaji Brigade is a little-known offshoot of the Hindu rightwing Maratha Sewa Sangh. It appears to have been casting about for a cause that would garner headline space, and it has succeeded beyond all reasonable expectation. In the Times of India, MSS founder Khedekar was quoted: "Some passages in Laine's book state that Shivaji's renowned mentors, Samarth Ramdas Swami and Dadaji Kondeo, are [sic] his biological fathers. This kind of brutish penmanship raises questions about Jijamata's morals as well. How can we tolerate such blasphemy?"
How can we, indeed-if such blasphemy had been perpetrated at all, that is. Leaving aside the issue of how two men could simultaneously father a child, a biologically impossible feat, the fact remains that Khendekar grossly distorts Laine’s actual line of research. The historian has clarified that the book is not a biography, but a look into the origin and development of the Shivaji legend.
In yesterday’s LA Times, Laine wrote: “The last chapter is where I entertained what I called ‘unthinkable thoughts’ — questioning ‘cracks’ in the Shivaji narrative. I wondered, for example, why no one considered the possibility that Shivaji's parents were estranged, given that they never lived together during the period the three were alive (1630-1664), and that the tale provided ‘father substitutes’ for the king-to-be. Why not entertain such an idea? What made it unthinkable? As it turned out, the ‘owners’ of Shivaji's story had their own set of questions, delivered with a punch: Who should be allowed to portray this history? Should an outsider, working with Brahmin English-speaking elites, have a greater say in Shivaji's story than Shivaji's own community?”
Pointing out the presence of “father-substitutes” is a very different thing from questioning Shivaji’s parenthood. But this key distinction has been lost. As Laine writes, once the book became unavailable, there was nothing to prevent “rumour piling on rumour”.
In other words, the Sena's activists were protesting about a book they'd never read, on the grounds that its author had made statements he may not have made, ignoring the fact that the book had already been withdrawn before they embarked on their lumpen assault. The intention seems to be to allow only a cartoon Amar Chitra Katha version of Shivaji's life to stand in for the truth. Any scholar who might suggest that Hindu-Muslim relations were a little more complex in that day and age than the equation of Hindu/ good nationalist, Muslim/ bad aggressor, will be shouted down. Any biographer who chooses to write about Shivaji's life, rather than the Sena-authorised version in primary colours, is best advised to destroy his work, unwritten, unread and unpublished. This is exactly what Bhaskar Gajanan Mehendale did when he tore up 400 pages of his unpublished Shivaji biography in despair and in protest at the age of pre-censorship.
Those who have forgotten their history are now the only ones who will be permitted to write it, in an illiterate's scrawl, their words informed by venom and prejudice rather than reason and scholarship. If Laine’s work is flawed, challenge him; ask him about his sources; subject him to the rigours of a debate. If his speculations are unfounded, tell him, or write a better book. The mindless slogan-shouting of an ill-informed mob is no kind of answer.