(Published in the Business Standard, December 20, 2011.)
Except for the books, they had little in common. The writers and book lovers who died in 2011 spanned worlds of experience, from Diana Wynne Jones, who survived a horrifying childhood to become a writer of children’s books, to Vaclav Havel, the playwright who ushered his country safely into revolution and beyond. This column pays tribute to some of the best.
George Whitman, proprietor of Shakespeare & Company: “The rumour spread to the corners of the world that there was a strange bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris where you could sleep for free. A generation of writers and wanderers were sheltered and fed, and then that generation’s children,” wrote Jeremy Mercer of George Whitman’s bookstore.
Whitman had soup, dubious pancakes and books on offer for all who came; and Shakespeare & Company may be the only bookstore in the world to have its own, official song. “If you ever come to Paris/ On a cold and rainy night/ And find the Shakespeare store/ It can be a welcome sight…”
Indira Goswami: Better known to the young writers and countless friends who found shelter, companionship and a link to “home” in Assam as Mamoni Raisom, Indira Goswami’s novels and other writings defined Ahomiya literature for at least three decades.
In her Unfinished Autobiography, she wrote that all the places she loved were riverine places, from the Ahiron in Madhya Pradesh and the Chandrabhaga in Kashmir to the Thames in London, as though the Brahmaputra had marked her fiction indelibly. “Without my pen, I would die,” she said many years later.
Christopher Hitchens: It was typical of Hitchens, perhaps the true literary heir to Kingsley Amis and Hunter S Thompson, that the Twitter account he started about a year before his death from cancer ran under the flag of @hitchbitch. Hitchens was unabashedly outspoken, the last of the grand old hacks, stubbornly defending his support of the Iraq war, ferocious in his attacks on organised religion and what he saw as the iniquities of faith.
His literary journalism was of a piece with the man — laddish, opinionated, sharp. There would be no RIPs for Hitch; he had already written his epitaphs, in utterly unsentimental examinations of the indignities of late-stage cancer. Of his obituarists, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie were among the best, paying homage, as Rushdie put it, to a “great voice” and a “great heart”.
Srilal Shukla: Of all the satire and fiction Srilal Shukla wrote, the one that would last was Raag Darbari, written in the late 1960s, still as trenchant and biting today, over four decades later. His protagonist, Vaidyaji, was the philosophical manipulator who knew exactly how to make a corrupt system work for him. Shukla’s Shivpalganj was an amalgam of the many places he had known and worked in as a government servant.
There was a classic moment at the Neemrana literary festival, where a TV anchor asked Shukla to step out of the frame so that they could get footage of Naipaul. The cameraman was horrified. “Don’t you know who this is?” he told the anchor, who recognised neither Shukla nor the mention of Raag Darbari. Giving up, the cameraman said in exasperation, “This is Naipaul’s baap!” But Shuklaji had already left, amused rather than offended.
H R F Keating: In 1999, the creator of Inspector Ghote published an odd, now forgotten book: Jack, the Lady-Killer. This crime novel in verse was inspired by Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, though Keating confessed he couldn’t match Seth’s rhymes. (The title was taken from The Golden Gate: “The old folks settle down with books:/ He with Tom Jones, she with a thriller/ Entitled Jack the Lady-Killer.”)
This was not the first time Keating had turned to India for inspiration. Inspector Ghote was born in the early 1960s, out of a romantic fascination with a country Keating had read about but never visited. Ghote’s name was borrowed from a George Bernard Shaw diatribe about the illogic of the English language, where you could spell “fish” as “ghoti” — using “gh” as in tough, “o” as in women, “ti” as in mention. But the real allure of Inspector Ghote, for Keating, was that the anarchy of the Bombay CID allowed him to get away from the more stifling conventions of the English detective novel.
Ghote was a good man in a corrupt world, intent on following “the proper procedure” through a delightfully varied list of cases. By the early 2000s (Bribery, Corruption Also and Breaking and Entering), Ghote had become an anachronism, and references to Keating were almost always prefaced with the word “old-fashioned”; but he is still remembered with affection.
Diana Wynne Jones: The year was a hard one for fantasy-lovers, who lost Anne McCaffrey and Russell Hoban as well as Jones. Jones’ fantasies, from the Chrestomanci series to Howl’s Moving Castle, were guaranteed free of mawkishness and predictability. She wrote for the child she had been herself; frighteningly bright, alive and alert to the world, already aware that magic might have its dark side and fairies might have their own twisted agenda. “Writing for adults you have to keep reminding them of what is going on,” she had said. “The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once.”
Showing posts with label obituary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obituary. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Monday, January 18, 2010
Obituaries: Paul Samuelson, Dilip Chitre
(Published in the Business Standard, December 2009)
Paul Samuelson had a Nobel Prize in economics to his credit, a large and faithful following who venerated him for his resurrection of Keynesian economic theory, the ear of several US Presidents and a tradition of fruitful, running battles with the likes of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan. But when he died this Sunday, at the age of 94, the legacy he left behind him was to be found in college classrooms across the world.
The fascinating thing about Economics, his bestselling textbook, is not that it was so comprehensive and influential when it first came out in 1948. Samuelson was very much a product of the Great Depression in the US, and credited his development to being in the right place at the right time—ie, Harvard of the early 1930s, where he learned his trade under the tutelage of Joseph Schumpeter, Alvin Hansen and others.
In his Nobel acceptance speech, Samuelson spoke of that era: “Just when I had completed my advanced training, World War II came, followed by fifty years of exploding college economics enrollments. My generation had a strong wind at its back. My famous teachers had become full professors only after 40. Wunderkinds in my generation could become anointed before age 30. Outside the Ivory Tower, economists were sought out by governments, corporations, Wall Street traders, and textbook publishers.”
The other great truth of his life was the importance of getting paid for work that he would happily have done for free. When McGraw Hill approached Samuelson to write a basic textbook on economics, he took on the task with trademark seriousness. When the classic 1948 textbook celebrated its 50th anniversary—Samuelson’s Economics, in its updated edition, is now just over 60 years old—he set down his intention as a young, upcoming academic in the 1940s:
“My great predecessors—John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, Frank Taussig and Irving Fisher—were writing for their times. I was writing for the last half of the 20th century—an epoch that surpassed even my youthful optimism.”
Over the decades, Samuelson’s brand of economics has been revised, attacked and reassessed. But his textbook, augmented by William Nordhaus’ corrections and updates, has endured, in a field where shifts in theory can be violent, merciless and leave innumerable “books of the decade” on the remainder pile.
Stanley Fisher, who read the textbook as a student in Zimbabwe, got its enduring appeal better than most: “To read Economics is to have a glimpse of the extraordinary mind that created it: undogmatic, generous to predecessors and contemporaries, encyclopaedic, of course brilliant, and, most remarkably, sceptical, not inclined to take itself too seriously.” Literary classics often survive a century, but if Samuelson’s Economics does, it will be among the few textbooks aside from Gray’s Anatomy to achieve that distinction.
* * *
In memoriam: This week also marked the passing of the poet, translator and critic Dilip Chitre, who died at the age of 71 in Pune, of cancer. For many of us, Dilip Chitre often represented three poets in one. There was his own, iconoclastic work—a massive corpus where the Ekun Kavita (collected poems) runs to three thick volumes.
Chitre’s comfortable bilingualism and his famous intolerance for shibboleths guaranteed that he would not be lionised by the Marathi critics of his day, though it was a different story when it came to his work in English.
For readers outside Marathi, Chitre opened up and made new the work of two distinctly different voices—Sant Tukaram, the 17th century Marathi poet-saint known for his sinewy, uncompromising mysticism, and Namdeo Dhasal, once seen as the firebrand of contemporary Dalit literature. Chitre was drawn to the power and strength in both these writers. He was influenced by another great poet, Arun Kolatkar, when it came to translating Tukaram: he approached the poems “like a dance”, paying attention to the rhythm and the back-and-forth of the structure, where each poem begins with the words “Says Tuka”.
His Dhasal translations are towering, and are deliberately unlyrical: Gaandu Bagicha, for instance, is translated with no euphemisms for Dhasal’s out-to-shock language of the streets and the slums, and the Golpitha poems retain Dhasal’s searing images. (Dhasal grew up in Golpitha, and his memories of his father’s butcher’s shop form some of the most powerful images in that early series of work.)
Chitre was unimpressed by the rabid demands of those who wanted cultural censorship on the grounds that specific books or works of art offend religious sentiments. In a classic email to India Uncut, he laid down the true meaning of the word secular: “In India, it is often misinterpreted as ‘equally sensitive to all religions’ and not ‘equally neutral to all religions’… Whether God or democracy is our priority as citizens of this nation cannot be left to God to decide. He is not a registered voter in India.” Many of us hope that even after his death, Chitre will have the final word on this subject.
Paul Samuelson had a Nobel Prize in economics to his credit, a large and faithful following who venerated him for his resurrection of Keynesian economic theory, the ear of several US Presidents and a tradition of fruitful, running battles with the likes of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan. But when he died this Sunday, at the age of 94, the legacy he left behind him was to be found in college classrooms across the world.
The fascinating thing about Economics, his bestselling textbook, is not that it was so comprehensive and influential when it first came out in 1948. Samuelson was very much a product of the Great Depression in the US, and credited his development to being in the right place at the right time—ie, Harvard of the early 1930s, where he learned his trade under the tutelage of Joseph Schumpeter, Alvin Hansen and others.
In his Nobel acceptance speech, Samuelson spoke of that era: “Just when I had completed my advanced training, World War II came, followed by fifty years of exploding college economics enrollments. My generation had a strong wind at its back. My famous teachers had become full professors only after 40. Wunderkinds in my generation could become anointed before age 30. Outside the Ivory Tower, economists were sought out by governments, corporations, Wall Street traders, and textbook publishers.”
The other great truth of his life was the importance of getting paid for work that he would happily have done for free. When McGraw Hill approached Samuelson to write a basic textbook on economics, he took on the task with trademark seriousness. When the classic 1948 textbook celebrated its 50th anniversary—Samuelson’s Economics, in its updated edition, is now just over 60 years old—he set down his intention as a young, upcoming academic in the 1940s:
“My great predecessors—John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, Frank Taussig and Irving Fisher—were writing for their times. I was writing for the last half of the 20th century—an epoch that surpassed even my youthful optimism.”
Over the decades, Samuelson’s brand of economics has been revised, attacked and reassessed. But his textbook, augmented by William Nordhaus’ corrections and updates, has endured, in a field where shifts in theory can be violent, merciless and leave innumerable “books of the decade” on the remainder pile.
Stanley Fisher, who read the textbook as a student in Zimbabwe, got its enduring appeal better than most: “To read Economics is to have a glimpse of the extraordinary mind that created it: undogmatic, generous to predecessors and contemporaries, encyclopaedic, of course brilliant, and, most remarkably, sceptical, not inclined to take itself too seriously.” Literary classics often survive a century, but if Samuelson’s Economics does, it will be among the few textbooks aside from Gray’s Anatomy to achieve that distinction.
* * *
In memoriam: This week also marked the passing of the poet, translator and critic Dilip Chitre, who died at the age of 71 in Pune, of cancer. For many of us, Dilip Chitre often represented three poets in one. There was his own, iconoclastic work—a massive corpus where the Ekun Kavita (collected poems) runs to three thick volumes.
Chitre’s comfortable bilingualism and his famous intolerance for shibboleths guaranteed that he would not be lionised by the Marathi critics of his day, though it was a different story when it came to his work in English.
For readers outside Marathi, Chitre opened up and made new the work of two distinctly different voices—Sant Tukaram, the 17th century Marathi poet-saint known for his sinewy, uncompromising mysticism, and Namdeo Dhasal, once seen as the firebrand of contemporary Dalit literature. Chitre was drawn to the power and strength in both these writers. He was influenced by another great poet, Arun Kolatkar, when it came to translating Tukaram: he approached the poems “like a dance”, paying attention to the rhythm and the back-and-forth of the structure, where each poem begins with the words “Says Tuka”.
His Dhasal translations are towering, and are deliberately unlyrical: Gaandu Bagicha, for instance, is translated with no euphemisms for Dhasal’s out-to-shock language of the streets and the slums, and the Golpitha poems retain Dhasal’s searing images. (Dhasal grew up in Golpitha, and his memories of his father’s butcher’s shop form some of the most powerful images in that early series of work.)
Chitre was unimpressed by the rabid demands of those who wanted cultural censorship on the grounds that specific books or works of art offend religious sentiments. In a classic email to India Uncut, he laid down the true meaning of the word secular: “In India, it is often misinterpreted as ‘equally sensitive to all religions’ and not ‘equally neutral to all religions’… Whether God or democracy is our priority as citizens of this nation cannot be left to God to decide. He is not a registered voter in India.” Many of us hope that even after his death, Chitre will have the final word on this subject.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
The BS Column: Five Lessons from the Teacher Man
(Published in the Business Standard, July 20, 2009.
There are some writers you respect chiefly for the calibre of their work; what they're like as human beings is almost irrelevant. And there are some writers who become important to you because their work reflects their personality: in Frank McCourt's case, I loved his writing not just for his amazing stories, but for the humour and generosity that seemed to be so much part of him. Here's a tribute from the New York Times; and here's an excerpt from Teacher Man.)
Frank McCourt, who died this week of meningitis, was by his own account a resounding failure. In his forties, he was still a substitute teacher. His first marriage failed. He made an abortive attempt to earn a doctorate at Trinity. He felt inferior in the company of writers—even in the company of inferior writers. In his sixties, he began to write; he was 66 when he published his first book, and he hoped it would sell a few hundred copies.
The book McCourt wrote became the Pulitzer-winning bestseller, Angela’s Ashes. In his third book, Teacher Man, McCourt offered a bleak summary of his life: “I was born in New York and taken to Ireland before I was four. I had three brothers. My father, an alcoholic, wild man, great patriot, ready always to die for Ireland, abandoned us when I was ten going on eleven. A baby sister died, twin boys died, two boys were born. My mother begged for food, clothing, and coal to boil water for the tea… My brothers and I left school at fourteen, worked, dreamed of America, and one by one, sailed away.” It wasn’t just the inherent drama of his life that made Angela’s Ashes such a well-loved book—it was the honesty and humour with which he told his story.
McCourt never held forth on the craft of writing; and yet, reading his books could teach you more about being a writer than most creative writing 101 classes. In tribute to him, here are five things I learned about writing from his work.
Write with honesty, without expectation: “Just one more year, God, just one more year because this book is the one thing I want to do in my life, what’s left of it.” In the wake of the success of Angela’s Ashes, many people who had buried dreams of being a writer dusted their manuscripts off and tried to emulate McCourt. Few made it; they were looking for the success McCourt had serendipitously found, and didn’t share either his talent or his need to tell his story. “I never dreamed it would be a bestseller,” McCourt continues. He wrote this book, not looking for results, for the only reason that counts—he wanted to.
Collect stories, wherever you find them: For most of his life, McCourt didn’t even realise he was doing this—collecting and shaping his childhood memories, listening to the thousands of students he taught over the years, capturing the essence of the characters he met when working at the dockyards. Looking at a bunch of excuse notes forged by his students, he has an epiphany. “The drawer [of excuse notes] was filled with samples of American talent never mentioned in song, story or scholarly study. How could I have ignored this treasure trove, these gems of fiction, fantasy, creativity, crawthumping, self-pity, family problems…. Here was American high school writing at its best—raw, real, urgent, lucid, brief, lying.”
Recognise the kind of writer you don’t want to be: Early in his career, McCourt meets a “real” writer, Edward Dahlberg, who is often cited on lists of unjustly neglected American writers. “I envied him for living the life of a writer, a dream I was too timid to chance,” writes McCourt. But Dahlberg is a pompous poser, susceptible to flattery, whining and bitter, fond of the heavy-handed putdown. “Except for himself, [he] dismissed everyone in the twentieth century,” says McCourt, witheringly contemptuous of Dahlberg’s “moaning” about the daily suffering of a writer at his desk. McCourt will find the guidance he needs elsewhere.
Unleash creativity: In a fabulous passage, McCourt energizes his class by getting them to read recipes from cookbooks as though they were poetry. They read the recipes out to an impromptu band composed of the class’s guitarists, harmonica and oboe players. They argue over the kind of music that should accompany English trifle—not the bongo drums—or pork chops—definitely the harmonica.
Two asides; McCourt follows this class by reading his students more conventional poetry, trusting that they will now have developed a ear for it. And the reason why he can describe experiences like this—or the death of his baby sister back in Ireland—so well is because of his lifelong habit of keeping notes, doing the mundane tasks of cross-checking his memories, keeping track of dates. He does the creative experiments, in his writing and in the classroom, but he also does the scut-work.
And finally? “Listen. Are you listening? You’re not listening. I am talking to those of you in this class who might be interested in writing. Every moment of your life, you’re writing. Even in your dreams you’re writing. … A simple stroll in the hallway calls for paragraphs, sentences in your head, decisions galore…. Find what you love and do it.”
There are some writers you respect chiefly for the calibre of their work; what they're like as human beings is almost irrelevant. And there are some writers who become important to you because their work reflects their personality: in Frank McCourt's case, I loved his writing not just for his amazing stories, but for the humour and generosity that seemed to be so much part of him. Here's a tribute from the New York Times; and here's an excerpt from Teacher Man.)
Frank McCourt, who died this week of meningitis, was by his own account a resounding failure. In his forties, he was still a substitute teacher. His first marriage failed. He made an abortive attempt to earn a doctorate at Trinity. He felt inferior in the company of writers—even in the company of inferior writers. In his sixties, he began to write; he was 66 when he published his first book, and he hoped it would sell a few hundred copies.The book McCourt wrote became the Pulitzer-winning bestseller, Angela’s Ashes. In his third book, Teacher Man, McCourt offered a bleak summary of his life: “I was born in New York and taken to Ireland before I was four. I had three brothers. My father, an alcoholic, wild man, great patriot, ready always to die for Ireland, abandoned us when I was ten going on eleven. A baby sister died, twin boys died, two boys were born. My mother begged for food, clothing, and coal to boil water for the tea… My brothers and I left school at fourteen, worked, dreamed of America, and one by one, sailed away.” It wasn’t just the inherent drama of his life that made Angela’s Ashes such a well-loved book—it was the honesty and humour with which he told his story.
McCourt never held forth on the craft of writing; and yet, reading his books could teach you more about being a writer than most creative writing 101 classes. In tribute to him, here are five things I learned about writing from his work.
Write with honesty, without expectation: “Just one more year, God, just one more year because this book is the one thing I want to do in my life, what’s left of it.” In the wake of the success of Angela’s Ashes, many people who had buried dreams of being a writer dusted their manuscripts off and tried to emulate McCourt. Few made it; they were looking for the success McCourt had serendipitously found, and didn’t share either his talent or his need to tell his story. “I never dreamed it would be a bestseller,” McCourt continues. He wrote this book, not looking for results, for the only reason that counts—he wanted to.
Collect stories, wherever you find them: For most of his life, McCourt didn’t even realise he was doing this—collecting and shaping his childhood memories, listening to the thousands of students he taught over the years, capturing the essence of the characters he met when working at the dockyards. Looking at a bunch of excuse notes forged by his students, he has an epiphany. “The drawer [of excuse notes] was filled with samples of American talent never mentioned in song, story or scholarly study. How could I have ignored this treasure trove, these gems of fiction, fantasy, creativity, crawthumping, self-pity, family problems…. Here was American high school writing at its best—raw, real, urgent, lucid, brief, lying.”
Recognise the kind of writer you don’t want to be: Early in his career, McCourt meets a “real” writer, Edward Dahlberg, who is often cited on lists of unjustly neglected American writers. “I envied him for living the life of a writer, a dream I was too timid to chance,” writes McCourt. But Dahlberg is a pompous poser, susceptible to flattery, whining and bitter, fond of the heavy-handed putdown. “Except for himself, [he] dismissed everyone in the twentieth century,” says McCourt, witheringly contemptuous of Dahlberg’s “moaning” about the daily suffering of a writer at his desk. McCourt will find the guidance he needs elsewhere.
Unleash creativity: In a fabulous passage, McCourt energizes his class by getting them to read recipes from cookbooks as though they were poetry. They read the recipes out to an impromptu band composed of the class’s guitarists, harmonica and oboe players. They argue over the kind of music that should accompany English trifle—not the bongo drums—or pork chops—definitely the harmonica.
Two asides; McCourt follows this class by reading his students more conventional poetry, trusting that they will now have developed a ear for it. And the reason why he can describe experiences like this—or the death of his baby sister back in Ireland—so well is because of his lifelong habit of keeping notes, doing the mundane tasks of cross-checking his memories, keeping track of dates. He does the creative experiments, in his writing and in the classroom, but he also does the scut-work.
And finally? “Listen. Are you listening? You’re not listening. I am talking to those of you in this class who might be interested in writing. Every moment of your life, you’re writing. Even in your dreams you’re writing. … A simple stroll in the hallway calls for paragraphs, sentences in your head, decisions galore…. Find what you love and do it.”
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
The BS Column: Habib Tanvir
(Published in the Business Standard, June 9, 2009)The distance from Raipur, where Habib Ahmed Khan was born, to Bhopal, where Habib Tanvir died recently, is little more than 630 km—a narrow compass.
But Habib Tanvir’s life as a playwright and a poet, “Tanvir” being the takhallus he adopted as a young man, was broader in scope. It took him from ancient Greece to contemporary Europe, from Rajasthani folk fables to fierce political drama in Bengal—always, though, via Chattisgarh.
I met the legendary founder of the Naya Theatre when we were both in search of an exit. Delhi’s English-language theatre was inundated with bedroom farces, and that evening’s comedy at the Kamini auditorium was unbearably bad. Sneaking away at interval, I found the front door locked—presumably by a director aware that there was no better way to retain his audience. A rumpled man with black-framed spectacles beckoned me over conspiratorially: “Look! We can escape from the side.”
With the brashness of youth, I told him why I thought Delhi theatre was terrible. He was gentle with my ignorance. “Try your luck further down the road,” he said, mentioning a play festival at Mandi House. He spoke of Alkazi, Girish Karnad, Badal Sarkar and then said, “I’ve done a little play writing myself. There’s one you might like, called Agra Bazaar. My name’s Habib Tanvir.”
We met a few times over the years, and that central modesty never shifted, though he was perfectly aware of his worth. He once said that he had begun his career seeing himself as a writer—as time went by, he felt that his role was to be a translator and a sutradhar. He spent most of his life on the road with the Naya Theatre troupe as actor, director, adaptor, writer, producer, manager, narrator; his engagement was active, right up till his eightieth year. As a small tribute, here’s a look at some of the plays that shaped Tanvir sahib.
Agra Bazaar (1954): As a young man growing up in Raipur and Aligarh, Tanvir developed a sharp ear for the many flavours of Hindi; he had a special fondness for the richness of Chattisgarhi-accented Hindi, and for the language of the bazaar versus the durbar. He was fascinated by the 18th century poet, Nazir Akbarabadi. Akbarabadi was very much a common man’s poet, writing verses to the ordinary man-on-the-street (in the Aadmi Nama), to a hand-fan, to dal, to cucumbers.
Tanvir’s Agra Bazaar takes a vegetable vendor who believes that if he could only get a poet to write in praise of his wares, he would sell more sabzis. Scorned by the great bards of the day, he finally finds Akbarabadi—who remains an offstage presence—and poetry comes down from the courts to the streets. Staged by Tanvir, Agra Bazaar became a brilliant spectacle, gently stressing that literature and poetry are the prerogative of the masses, not just a rarefied few.
Charandas Chor (1975): The story of a thief who keeps his honour at the cost of his life by stealing, but keeping his commitment to refrain from doing four things, is a stage classic. In Tanvir’s version, it showcased the rich roughness of the Chattisgarhi dialect, and brought folk theatre into an urban setting. It developed a second life, adapted as a children’s play.
One of Tanvir’s strengths was to take material written by others and to reshape it for the stage—Charandas Chor was originally based on a Rajasthani folk tale adapted by Vijaydan Detha.
Raj-Rakta (2006): Tagore’s Visarjan is one of his most powerful and most flawed plays, based on a clash between the priest of a kingdom and his king over whether animal sacrifice should be banned. Tanvir’s instinct was to go back to the far stronger novel, Rajarshi (1887) on which Visarjan was based, and meld the play and the novel. Unfortunately, Raj-Rakta works better in text form—it remained awkward on stage in the Naya Theatre production—but Tanvir’s script, if you can get it, remains a classic example of how to write an adaptation.
Ponga Pundit (1930s, staged by Tanvir 1960s onwards): Ponga Pundit is identified so strongly with Naya Theatre and Tanvir that many assume he was the author. It was written, as he often pointed out, by two folk artists, Sukhram and Sitaram, as a takedown of organized religion (and corrupt priests) and works best as improvisational theatre.
After the 1992 razing of the Babri Masjid, Tanvir’s performances of the play were often attacked by the Shiv Sena—under the mistaken assumption that he, as a Muslim, was insulting Hinduism. Naya Theatre took the rotten eggs, tomatoes and hecklers in their stride and continued to produce the play. (Read more about this here.)
Perhaps Tanvir sahib’s more esoteric plays—such as the one on the Greek mathematician Hypatia—will fade into obscurity. But his brand of folk theatre has proved surprisingly robust, and though we’ll miss that lean figure with the mobile expressions on stage, his plays will survive his passing.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
The BS Column: Kamala Das, Madhavikutty, Suraiya (1934-2009)
(Published in the Business Standard, June 2, 2009)
“Belong, cried the categorizers. Don’t sit
On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or better
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Choose a name, a role. “
('An Introduction', Kamala Das)
A name, a role, a religion, a language: all her life, Kamala Das questioned and rejected belonging even as she longed for it. By the time of her death this weekend, 75 and still settling into an identity, Kamala Das stood for certain things in the public imagination: she was the short story writer, the woman who wrote of sexuality with a freedom unthinkable for the times, and then retreated into purdah, an apostate turned convert who rejected Krishna for Islam.
(* A reader, Fr.Vayalil Joseph Joy, writes in to clarify that Kamala Das never rejected Krishna for Islam: "Love for Krishna, I feel, was always a part of her life., though we donot know how or whether she could reconcile this with her new faith.")
Few of this generation’s women writers know her as more than a name—sometimes a caricature—and to some extent, Kamala Das left behind a mixed legacy, too much rubbish thrown in with the good stuff. Those who read in English knew her chiefly as a poet, and she could be a very acute one; but she was also overly prolific, and many of her poems suffer from a lack of revision. She was far more interested in capturing the perfect emotion than the perfect line.
Those who read in Malayalam knew her as a short story writer whose work reflected the frustrations of a generation of women who were just beginning to question marriage and the domestic life, just beginning to embrace their own sexuality and need for freedom. Many knew her only by her autobiography, published as My Story, which was an often intense, often rambling account of her loves, her writing, her need for something larger than the world of tradition and the hearth.
'....No, not for me the beguiling promise of
domestic bliss, the goodnight kiss, the weekly
letter that begins with the word dearest,
Not for me the hollowness of marital vows and
the loneliness of a double bed, where someone
lies dreaming of another mate, a woman perhaps
lustier than his own....'
('Annamalai Poems', Kamala Das)
Kamala Das grew up in a house where literature and writing was the order of the day—her great-uncle was a writer, her mother, Nalapatt Balamani Amma, was a respected poet, and her father was the managing editor of Matrubhumi. She wrote as a child, but only began to write professionally after marriage and motherhood. Her views were shocking in that time, her frankness about female desire revelatory and unsettling.
'....Gift him all,
Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your
Endless female hungers....'
('The Looking Glass', Kamala Das)
Today, it’s hard to see the impact that lines of these would have had for a previous generation. Writers like Catherine Millet (The Sexual Life of Catherine M) and Charlotte Roche (Wetlands) now examine their sexual history in detailed laundry lists that leave nothing, from haemorrhoids to orgies as meticulously planned as a 19th century tea party, to the imagination. But for women—and men—trapped in a multitude of roles that stressed the centrality of the family, Kamala Das’ passionate evocation of desire, her demand that women be given lives, and rooms, of their own, was revolutionary.
'....Purdah is a kind of safety.
The body finds a place to hide.
The cloth fans out against the skin
Much like the earth that falls
on coffins after they put the dead men in....'
('Purdah I', Imtiaz Dharker)
In her sixties, Kamala Das, who had once written with deep feeling about the Radha-Krishna relationship, discovered a need for subjugation, a turning away from the freedom she had so often longed for and fought for.* Her conversion to Islam created yet another identity for her; as Suraiyya, she abjured many of the things that had defined her as a writer. Hindus, especially the liberal fold, were shocked at this late-life change of faith. Nor did it please those who had studied Islam in depth and felt that Kamala Das/ Suraiyya had woefully misunderstood the faith.
Kamala Das had become, she said in an interview, a “puritan in all senses”; but the purdah she embraced so eagerly was deconstructed by another poet, Imtiaz Dharker, in the lines quoted above. Dharker was writing in general terms, but in many ways, she captured what Kamala Das was seeking—a place to hide, a kind of safety after the years of rebellion. In the process, Kamala Das lost the ability to define herself, except in the most fluid terms—she would remain, to the end, a seeker who never quite knew what she was looking for.
(P.S. That's a drawing by Imtiaz Dharker at the top of the post. I like her work a lot, and hope she doesn't mind my using it.)
Friday, August 31, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut: Farewell, Hello
(Published in the Business Standard, April 16, 2007)
“Please, please, please. Nobody else die!” That was the first line of the tribute Kurt Vonnegut wrote when his friend, the poet Allen Ginsburg, died.
Vonnegut never intended to outlast his fellow hell-raisers, from Ginsburg to William Burroughs to Joseph Heller, but he did, until he took a fall down his stairs a few weeks ago and went, reasonably quietly, in his eighties. A thousand obituary writers and bloggers dusted off Vonnegut’s catchphrase, the one that became the refrain of the cult novel Slaughterhouse Five. So it goes, Kurt, they said. So it goes.
Vonnegut could have, but didn’t, to his astonishment and everyone else’s, died at several points of his often embattled life. There was the time in 2000 when his house caught fire, and he survived potential death by smoke inhalation. It would have been a “shapely” death, he said later.
In 1984, he used alcohol and pills to try and kill himself, but survived the attempted suicide. He often joked about how he botched the job, but suicides littered his life. His mother committed suicide when he was in his early twenties. So did some of his friends: “Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers,” he said once. And in one of his more off-the-wall pieces, Vonnegut wrote about the “final” conversation he had with his fictional creation, Kilgore Trout.
“Trout committed suicide by drinking Drano at midnight on October 15 in Cohoes, New York, after a female psychic using tarot cards predicted that the environmental calamity George W. Bush would once again be elected president…,” Vonnegut added in a helpful editorial note.
Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five in 1969, 24 years after he had been an unwilling witness to the firebombing of Dresden, on February 13, 1945. Vonnegut was a prisoner-of-war, imprisoned beneath the city; when he and his fellow prisoners came out, they found no city left. They buried corpses for the next week.
Billy Pilgrim, the hapless protagonist of Slaughterhouse Five, was also a survivor of Dresden in Vonnegut’s version, a man “unstuck in time”. Kidnapped by Tralfamadorians, exhibited with a movie star called Montana Wildhack, Billy’s time trouble helps him understand the key to surviving being human—if all moments in time are unpredictable, then no one moment is more important than another, not even the moment of death. When he is assassinated, by a raving lunatic, Billy’s final words are: “Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.”
There could be no better survival manual for the twentieth century than Slaughterhouse Five. Generations of college students instinctively gravitate to the book, and those adults bright enough to recognize that the endless drudgery of life—the bills, the taxes, the kids, the job—is not what we were solely meant for hold on to Pilgrim’s progress as though it were some kind of talisman.
Vonnegut shambled through his own life with the aid of his fictional alter-ego, Kilgore Trout. In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut, who had done his share of churning out stories to pay the bills, described Trout: “Trout's employer and co-workers had no idea that he was a writer. No reputable publisher had ever heard of him, for that matter, even though he had written one hundred and seventeen novels and two thousand short stories by the time he met Dwayne…. He thus got in touch with a firm called World Classics Library, which published hard-core pornography in Los Angeles, California. They used his stories, which usually didn't even have women in them, to give bulk to books and magazines of salacious pictures.”
Trout’s masterpieces included such works as ‘The Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto, or This Year's Masterpiece’, ‘ Gilgongo!’ and ‘Oh Say Can You Smell’. Many years after Kilgore Trout had found a faithful following, fans were surprised to find Venus on the Half-Shell, a novel written by Kilgore Trout. Some speculated that this was one of Vonnegut’s japes, but the novel was the work of fellow science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer. Vonnegut wasn’t amused; he asked Farmer not to continue with the ‘Kilgore Trout’ series. “I understand he was really burned up about my decision. I heard he had made more money in that one 'Kilgore Trout year' than he had ever made before -- in case you're too polite to ask, I didn't get any of the money,'' Vonnegut said in an interview.
By the end of his life, the creativity was drying up. Timequake, one of Vonnegut’s last published works, was nothing like Slaughterhouse Five, or Player Piano or the short stories in collections like Welcome to the Monkey House. But Vonnegut had given us enough. “I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over,” he made Finnerty say in Player Piano. “Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first.”
“Please, please, please. Nobody else die!” That was the first line of the tribute Kurt Vonnegut wrote when his friend, the poet Allen Ginsburg, died.
Vonnegut never intended to outlast his fellow hell-raisers, from Ginsburg to William Burroughs to Joseph Heller, but he did, until he took a fall down his stairs a few weeks ago and went, reasonably quietly, in his eighties. A thousand obituary writers and bloggers dusted off Vonnegut’s catchphrase, the one that became the refrain of the cult novel Slaughterhouse Five. So it goes, Kurt, they said. So it goes.
Vonnegut could have, but didn’t, to his astonishment and everyone else’s, died at several points of his often embattled life. There was the time in 2000 when his house caught fire, and he survived potential death by smoke inhalation. It would have been a “shapely” death, he said later.
In 1984, he used alcohol and pills to try and kill himself, but survived the attempted suicide. He often joked about how he botched the job, but suicides littered his life. His mother committed suicide when he was in his early twenties. So did some of his friends: “Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers,” he said once. And in one of his more off-the-wall pieces, Vonnegut wrote about the “final” conversation he had with his fictional creation, Kilgore Trout.
“Trout committed suicide by drinking Drano at midnight on October 15 in Cohoes, New York, after a female psychic using tarot cards predicted that the environmental calamity George W. Bush would once again be elected president…,” Vonnegut added in a helpful editorial note.
Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five in 1969, 24 years after he had been an unwilling witness to the firebombing of Dresden, on February 13, 1945. Vonnegut was a prisoner-of-war, imprisoned beneath the city; when he and his fellow prisoners came out, they found no city left. They buried corpses for the next week.
Billy Pilgrim, the hapless protagonist of Slaughterhouse Five, was also a survivor of Dresden in Vonnegut’s version, a man “unstuck in time”. Kidnapped by Tralfamadorians, exhibited with a movie star called Montana Wildhack, Billy’s time trouble helps him understand the key to surviving being human—if all moments in time are unpredictable, then no one moment is more important than another, not even the moment of death. When he is assassinated, by a raving lunatic, Billy’s final words are: “Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.”
There could be no better survival manual for the twentieth century than Slaughterhouse Five. Generations of college students instinctively gravitate to the book, and those adults bright enough to recognize that the endless drudgery of life—the bills, the taxes, the kids, the job—is not what we were solely meant for hold on to Pilgrim’s progress as though it were some kind of talisman.
Vonnegut shambled through his own life with the aid of his fictional alter-ego, Kilgore Trout. In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut, who had done his share of churning out stories to pay the bills, described Trout: “Trout's employer and co-workers had no idea that he was a writer. No reputable publisher had ever heard of him, for that matter, even though he had written one hundred and seventeen novels and two thousand short stories by the time he met Dwayne…. He thus got in touch with a firm called World Classics Library, which published hard-core pornography in Los Angeles, California. They used his stories, which usually didn't even have women in them, to give bulk to books and magazines of salacious pictures.”
Trout’s masterpieces included such works as ‘The Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto, or This Year's Masterpiece’, ‘ Gilgongo!’ and ‘Oh Say Can You Smell’. Many years after Kilgore Trout had found a faithful following, fans were surprised to find Venus on the Half-Shell, a novel written by Kilgore Trout. Some speculated that this was one of Vonnegut’s japes, but the novel was the work of fellow science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer. Vonnegut wasn’t amused; he asked Farmer not to continue with the ‘Kilgore Trout’ series. “I understand he was really burned up about my decision. I heard he had made more money in that one 'Kilgore Trout year' than he had ever made before -- in case you're too polite to ask, I didn't get any of the money,'' Vonnegut said in an interview.
By the end of his life, the creativity was drying up. Timequake, one of Vonnegut’s last published works, was nothing like Slaughterhouse Five, or Player Piano or the short stories in collections like Welcome to the Monkey House. But Vonnegut had given us enough. “I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over,” he made Finnerty say in Player Piano. “Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first.”
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Sham Lal's century of reading
(Published in the Business Standard, February 27, 2007)
For a certain generation of writers, thinkers and intellectuals, Sham Lal was not a man, but an institution. For another, younger and more fashionable set of "intellectuals", Sham Lal was a half-remembered name, his integrity almost old-fashioned in a time when it was normal to change one's opinions as casually, and as frequently, as you changed your clothes.
Sham Lal, who died on Saturday at the age of 94, was not to be found on Page 3 or among the rent-a-quote intellectuals who make their names on television shows. He had been the editor of The Times of India in an era when the measure of a newspaper lay in the quality of its writing and reportage, rather than the quality of its marketing campaigns. He was one of the founder-editors of Biblio, the literary magazine that functions as an oasis of intelligence in a desert of fatuity, and many of us looked forward to the essays he wrote for The Telegraph well into his nineties.
I was a junior dogsbody at Biblio when I was taken to Sham Lal's house to meet the editor. Like many other first-time visitors, it seemed to my dazed eyes that the house was constructed of books. Bookshelves reached from floor to ceiling in every room, their contents neatly ordered, spanning several centuries of human thought and creativity. He had original issues of The Paris Review, Criterion, and of defunct but once-great Indian literary magazines, vast collections of poetry and drama, and what appeared to be every important work ever published in the fields of history, criticism and the humanities. It was one of the best private libraries I had ever seen, and being there was like being inside a particularly well-stocked, curious and disciplined mind. Sham Lal himself was lying on a couch, reading Isaiah Berlin while columns of books rose up from the floor to spill over couch, keeping him company.
He was not a hoarder of knowledge. The book-lined house in Delhi's Gulmohar Park functioned as a superior literary saloon for many years, with some of the greatest and most interesting figures of the age, from Octavio Paz to Bipan Chandra, dropping in to spend time with Sham Lal.
I am often saddened, and sorry, when I meet younger writers or colleagues in journalism who don't know of Sham Lal, even when I know this amnesia is not their fault. They have missed out on so much. Most of his writing retains its freshness, clarity and incisiveness, and he wore his erudition lightly. His intellectual engagement with the world stemmed from an enormous respect for ideas, beliefs and the language that provided the building blocks for argument: "At a time when political rag chewing, hack writing, mass media banalities and high pressure sales talk do as much to corrupt the language as industrial wastes to pollute air and water, it is the poet's job to preserve the integrity of the written word." This may have been the poet's credo, but it was also Sham Lal's own.
I still remember his piece on Kafka and Thomas Mann, which begins: "For long, I have had the uneasy feeling that the doctrine of karma takes us straight into Franz Kafka's world. For, when most religions which had their birth in this country seek release—whatever the name by which they call it—from the cycle of rebirths, and explain away all that the individual suffers as a consequence of his or her deeds in a previous life about which he or she knows nothing, the story is not very different from what the Czech writer tells in The Trial." Sham Lal drew his philosophies from the world he was born in, and reached out with equal assurance to the wider world of Beckett and Kafka, Sartre and Berlin while columns of books rose up from the floor to spill over couch, keeping him company. Some writers escaped him: he found Jack Kerouac's world of dharma bums vapid, he recognised Ezra Pound's insanity, but not his genius.
There is a term that has fallen into disuse these days, when hyperbole has turned every writer inexorably into a genius producer of masterpieces and every reviewer into a critic of searing insight and intelligence. It used to be honourable to be considered a man of letters—it stood for someone who was deeply engaged with the life of the mind. If you look at the index to A Hundred Encounters, a collection of Sham Lal's writing, you gain some sense of the generous breadth of his world. It begins with Adorno and Akhmatova, moves through Baudelaire, the Bible and the Bhagwad Gita and traverses via Vishnu, Vidal, Van Gogh and Vyasa to, finally, Andrei Zhadnov. If one generation of thinkers had every reason to remember Sham Lal, the next generation has every reason not to forget him.
For a certain generation of writers, thinkers and intellectuals, Sham Lal was not a man, but an institution. For another, younger and more fashionable set of "intellectuals", Sham Lal was a half-remembered name, his integrity almost old-fashioned in a time when it was normal to change one's opinions as casually, and as frequently, as you changed your clothes.
Sham Lal, who died on Saturday at the age of 94, was not to be found on Page 3 or among the rent-a-quote intellectuals who make their names on television shows. He had been the editor of The Times of India in an era when the measure of a newspaper lay in the quality of its writing and reportage, rather than the quality of its marketing campaigns. He was one of the founder-editors of Biblio, the literary magazine that functions as an oasis of intelligence in a desert of fatuity, and many of us looked forward to the essays he wrote for The Telegraph well into his nineties.
I was a junior dogsbody at Biblio when I was taken to Sham Lal's house to meet the editor. Like many other first-time visitors, it seemed to my dazed eyes that the house was constructed of books. Bookshelves reached from floor to ceiling in every room, their contents neatly ordered, spanning several centuries of human thought and creativity. He had original issues of The Paris Review, Criterion, and of defunct but once-great Indian literary magazines, vast collections of poetry and drama, and what appeared to be every important work ever published in the fields of history, criticism and the humanities. It was one of the best private libraries I had ever seen, and being there was like being inside a particularly well-stocked, curious and disciplined mind. Sham Lal himself was lying on a couch, reading Isaiah Berlin while columns of books rose up from the floor to spill over couch, keeping him company.
He was not a hoarder of knowledge. The book-lined house in Delhi's Gulmohar Park functioned as a superior literary saloon for many years, with some of the greatest and most interesting figures of the age, from Octavio Paz to Bipan Chandra, dropping in to spend time with Sham Lal.
I am often saddened, and sorry, when I meet younger writers or colleagues in journalism who don't know of Sham Lal, even when I know this amnesia is not their fault. They have missed out on so much. Most of his writing retains its freshness, clarity and incisiveness, and he wore his erudition lightly. His intellectual engagement with the world stemmed from an enormous respect for ideas, beliefs and the language that provided the building blocks for argument: "At a time when political rag chewing, hack writing, mass media banalities and high pressure sales talk do as much to corrupt the language as industrial wastes to pollute air and water, it is the poet's job to preserve the integrity of the written word." This may have been the poet's credo, but it was also Sham Lal's own.
I still remember his piece on Kafka and Thomas Mann, which begins: "For long, I have had the uneasy feeling that the doctrine of karma takes us straight into Franz Kafka's world. For, when most religions which had their birth in this country seek release—whatever the name by which they call it—from the cycle of rebirths, and explain away all that the individual suffers as a consequence of his or her deeds in a previous life about which he or she knows nothing, the story is not very different from what the Czech writer tells in The Trial." Sham Lal drew his philosophies from the world he was born in, and reached out with equal assurance to the wider world of Beckett and Kafka, Sartre and Berlin while columns of books rose up from the floor to spill over couch, keeping him company. Some writers escaped him: he found Jack Kerouac's world of dharma bums vapid, he recognised Ezra Pound's insanity, but not his genius.
There is a term that has fallen into disuse these days, when hyperbole has turned every writer inexorably into a genius producer of masterpieces and every reviewer into a critic of searing insight and intelligence. It used to be honourable to be considered a man of letters—it stood for someone who was deeply engaged with the life of the mind. If you look at the index to A Hundred Encounters, a collection of Sham Lal's writing, you gain some sense of the generous breadth of his world. It begins with Adorno and Akhmatova, moves through Baudelaire, the Bible and the Bhagwad Gita and traverses via Vishnu, Vidal, Van Gogh and Vyasa to, finally, Andrei Zhadnov. If one generation of thinkers had every reason to remember Sham Lal, the next generation has every reason not to forget him.
The collector of tears
(January 26, 2007, Business Standard)
In the first few chapters of Kitne Pakistan, the nameless adeeb or writer who holds this mammoth novel together meets an old peasant who collects tears. “I have a laboratory… There, I collect the tears of the dispossessed, the oppressed and the tormented, and of those caught in the tentacles of death… I carry them away, cupped in my palm. I analyse them, seeking to understand the suffering, sorrow and despair from which they spring.”
The writer Kamleshwar, who died yesterday at the age of 75, wrote over 30 books, wrote numerous scripts for Hindi films and became one of the first and best-loved TV stars in India with Parikrama in the 1980s. He was a prolific screenplay writer and worked with directors like Gulzar, B R Chopra and Ramananda Sagar, but it was an odd marriage. He resented the need to write “commercially” and did much of this work for the money; but he had too much innate talent to be a successful commercial writer.
Far closer to his heart were his short stories—there are at least 10 collections by him, and he was one of the pioneers of the Nayi Kahani movement, along with the late Nirmal Verma, Mohan Rakesh and others. On a train journey from Jammu to Kanyakumari many years ago, I remember marking the point where North slid into South India by the station bookshops: there was a point where Kamleshwar’s short story collections gave way to Kalki’s novels and stories.
If there is one work he will be remembered by, though, it will be Kitne Pakistan, translated into English as the less searing Partitions. Kamleshwar had shown signs of ambition in works like Registan and Subah, Dopahar, Shaam, but Kitne Pakistan was unique, in terms of its concept. He began work on this in 1990. He was 15 years old when Partition happened and his memories of that time were searing, indelible. He could easily have taken the route traversed by writers like Chaman Nahal, whose Azaadi was an unblinking depiction of what happened to those who survived and had to remake their lives in alien territory, or Khushwant Singh, whose Train to Pakistan remains a rough-hewn classic.
On the only occasion I spoke to Kamleshwar, at a Sahitya Akademi gathering of writers, he repeated what he had often said: “My mind was in constant churning ferment, all my life those memories have demanded that I bear witness. But to what? There was no clear villain. There were no clear heroes. That was not how I remember that time.” This was several years ago, after he had finished Partitions. I was struck not by his words at the time so much as his voice—he had a deep, gravelly voice that assumed an inner, theatrical power when he spoke of things that moved him. It was a big voice for that neatly built, small man to carry around.
The great travel writer, Ryszard Kapuscinski, died just a few days before Kamleshwar. Kapuscinski covered, in a memorable phrase, 27 wars in 50 countries; he called his brand of writing “literature by foot”, a way of reportage where the author was always present, an essential witness to his times.
Kapuscinski had only this in common with Kamleshwar—that he had experienced extreme suffering and deprivation at an early age, in his case as a young boy growing up in wartime Poland. In an essay about that time, he writes: “We who went through the war know how difficult it is to convey the truth about it to those for whom that experience is, happily, unfamiliar. We know how language fails us, how often we feel helpless, how the experience is, finally, incommunicable. And yet, despite these difficulties and limitations, we should speak.…The dead admonish us. They bequeathed something important to us and now we must act responsibly.”
It is the dead who speak in Kamleshwar’s Partitions, in an endless, timeless trial where the only arbiter is the nameless adeeb, the anonymous writer. In order to understand Partition, Kamleshwar felt that we needed to hear from Gilgamesh, from Lord Mountbatten, from Aurangzeb and Chengiz Khan, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He and Kapuscinski never met. Kapuscinski traveled all across the world; Kamleshwar was born in Mainpuri, lived in Delhi and traveled chiefly in India. The two writers never met, but they had both heard the voices of the dead admonishing them. It was necessary for someone to be the collector of tears, or sweat, or dreams. In Partitions, Kamleshwar did all three.
In the first few chapters of Kitne Pakistan, the nameless adeeb or writer who holds this mammoth novel together meets an old peasant who collects tears. “I have a laboratory… There, I collect the tears of the dispossessed, the oppressed and the tormented, and of those caught in the tentacles of death… I carry them away, cupped in my palm. I analyse them, seeking to understand the suffering, sorrow and despair from which they spring.”
The writer Kamleshwar, who died yesterday at the age of 75, wrote over 30 books, wrote numerous scripts for Hindi films and became one of the first and best-loved TV stars in India with Parikrama in the 1980s. He was a prolific screenplay writer and worked with directors like Gulzar, B R Chopra and Ramananda Sagar, but it was an odd marriage. He resented the need to write “commercially” and did much of this work for the money; but he had too much innate talent to be a successful commercial writer.
Far closer to his heart were his short stories—there are at least 10 collections by him, and he was one of the pioneers of the Nayi Kahani movement, along with the late Nirmal Verma, Mohan Rakesh and others. On a train journey from Jammu to Kanyakumari many years ago, I remember marking the point where North slid into South India by the station bookshops: there was a point where Kamleshwar’s short story collections gave way to Kalki’s novels and stories.
If there is one work he will be remembered by, though, it will be Kitne Pakistan, translated into English as the less searing Partitions. Kamleshwar had shown signs of ambition in works like Registan and Subah, Dopahar, Shaam, but Kitne Pakistan was unique, in terms of its concept. He began work on this in 1990. He was 15 years old when Partition happened and his memories of that time were searing, indelible. He could easily have taken the route traversed by writers like Chaman Nahal, whose Azaadi was an unblinking depiction of what happened to those who survived and had to remake their lives in alien territory, or Khushwant Singh, whose Train to Pakistan remains a rough-hewn classic.
On the only occasion I spoke to Kamleshwar, at a Sahitya Akademi gathering of writers, he repeated what he had often said: “My mind was in constant churning ferment, all my life those memories have demanded that I bear witness. But to what? There was no clear villain. There were no clear heroes. That was not how I remember that time.” This was several years ago, after he had finished Partitions. I was struck not by his words at the time so much as his voice—he had a deep, gravelly voice that assumed an inner, theatrical power when he spoke of things that moved him. It was a big voice for that neatly built, small man to carry around.
The great travel writer, Ryszard Kapuscinski, died just a few days before Kamleshwar. Kapuscinski covered, in a memorable phrase, 27 wars in 50 countries; he called his brand of writing “literature by foot”, a way of reportage where the author was always present, an essential witness to his times.
Kapuscinski had only this in common with Kamleshwar—that he had experienced extreme suffering and deprivation at an early age, in his case as a young boy growing up in wartime Poland. In an essay about that time, he writes: “We who went through the war know how difficult it is to convey the truth about it to those for whom that experience is, happily, unfamiliar. We know how language fails us, how often we feel helpless, how the experience is, finally, incommunicable. And yet, despite these difficulties and limitations, we should speak.…The dead admonish us. They bequeathed something important to us and now we must act responsibly.”
It is the dead who speak in Kamleshwar’s Partitions, in an endless, timeless trial where the only arbiter is the nameless adeeb, the anonymous writer. In order to understand Partition, Kamleshwar felt that we needed to hear from Gilgamesh, from Lord Mountbatten, from Aurangzeb and Chengiz Khan, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He and Kapuscinski never met. Kapuscinski traveled all across the world; Kamleshwar was born in Mainpuri, lived in Delhi and traveled chiefly in India. The two writers never met, but they had both heard the voices of the dead admonishing them. It was necessary for someone to be the collector of tears, or sweat, or dreams. In Partitions, Kamleshwar did all three.
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