( From 'Critical Perspectives' ed. Anil Kapoor, Jaipur: Mark Publishers, 2012, ISBN 978-81-89472-95-5, pp. 59-69)
Reduced to beggary by Mumbai
Ate a piece of jaggery at Kalyan
In a village that had no name
But hand a waterfall
Sold one blanket
And had a fill of water
Chewing peepul leaves
Came up to Nashik
Sold Tukaram there
And ate kheema-pav on top
While leaving Agra Road
Broke a
chappal
( Arun
Kolatkar, trans. Dilip Chitre)
The
relationship between region and literature is an intricate one. The social,
cultural and historical location of writers plays a crucial role in determining
their sensibility, values, styles, themes and attitudes. As the quest and assertion of identity of
writers is frequently a significant characteristic of literary writing and as
the social, cultural and historical domain is often intertwined with
geographical setting, the quest for identity is often expressed in regional
terms. This paper looks at how the post Independence Marathi poetry imagines,
negotiates and represent Mumbai. Mumbai has played a decisive role in giving a
new direction to Marathi, Gujarati and Indian English poetry. The urban
experience of uprootedness, dehumanization, alienation and existential angst
against industrialized, commercial and consumerist culture is a constant
presence in the modernist poetry the world over. The paper explores the intimate relationship
between Mumbai and avant-garde movements in Marathi poetry like modernism and
postmodernism by analysing works of major Modernist poets like Vilas
Sarang, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre and
Namdeo Dhasal and the works of significant contemporary poets like Manya Joshi,
Varjesh Solanki, and Hemant Divate.
Marathi critics
have a curious way of periodizing the twentieth century Marathi literary
history. The conventional literary history marks the late nineteenth century
the beginning of the ‘modern’ literature (which is in keeping with many other
Indian literatures), and the phase after BS Mardhekar (c. 1940s) as ‘Modernist’.
For some critics the phase of rise of little magazine movements in the sixties
marks a new phase in Marathi literature, which is termed as ‘ Sathottari’ or ‘the
post-Sixties’ borrowed from the friendly neighbourhood of Hindi literature.
This phase is set off as a rejection or rebellion against the modernism of the
40s. This term is however is extremely problematic. The first problem is that
the earliest little magazine movements began in the early fifties, with Dilip
Chitre, Arun Kolatkar and others starting the cyclostyled little magazine named
‘Shabda’ in 1954, so it is not really ‘post-Sixties’ at all. The second, and
more serious problem, is that some of the important preoccupations of the so
called ‘post-Sixties’ can be traced back to Mardhekar himself. The preoccupations like amalgamation of
international modernist movements with the Bhakti traditions, or with idea of
alienation or the depiction of dark subjectivity and explicit sexuality, which
is common in the writings of Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar, Bhalchandra Nemade(
whose famous novel Kosla, shows clear
impact of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in
the Rye, in spite of his xenophobic version of nativism), Namdeo Dhasal (
who co-founded Dalit Panthers inspired by the Black Panther’s movement in
America), Vasant Abaji Dahke ( the dark surreal vision of Kafka is a major influence
on his works) and others are prominently present in Mardhekar’s poetry. Hence,
people who want to depict the post Sixties movement as a ‘nativist’ rejection
of the earlier modernist phase (termed ‘Satyakatha’-Modernism disparagingly by
the little magazine wallahs after the name of a reputed literary magazine which
published the works of early modernists as well as the early works of Chitre,
Dhasal and Kolatkar) have not read their literature carefully and critically.
A controversial
position is taken by Sridhar Tilve (1999), who claims the post-Sixties little
magazine is a third ‘modernity’ (or alternatively ‘postmodernism’) and the new
generation of poets who deal with social and cultural problems of post
liberalization phase are the poets of ‘Fourth modernity’ (‘post-post
modernist’, by Tilve’s arithmetic, the first phase being the late nineteenth
century , the second phase being the early modern phase of Mardhekar, Vinda
Karandikar etc and the third phase is the ‘post modern phase’ of Chitre, Kolatkar
etc.) The debate over the terminology is largely futile according to me,
because in India, no period exhibits complete break with the preceding period
and at the same time there is no period in which there is some discontinuity
with the previous period. I find Lyotard’s discussion of the term ‘postmodern’
very useful in this context. Lyotard defines post-modern as precisely the
avant-garde spirit to question received dogmas, parochial and received norms of
literature. If questioning the received dogmas and established norms of
literature is postmodernism in Lyotardian sense then postmodern even predates
modernism. In the Indian context, this spirit can go back to the Bhakti period
which was a period of intense questioning of norms and customs.
In his
influential sociological analysis of the modernist movement, Raymond Williams
(1990:164-170) focuses on the relationship between Modernism and metropolis
between the second half of the nineteenth century and of the first half of the
twentieth century. He notes that Modernism has seen in’ the new and specific
location of the artists and intellectuals... within the changing cultural
milieu of the metropolis’. He notes that the key cultural factor of the
modernist shift is the character of metropolis. He points out that immigration
to the great cities had direct influence on technical and formal innovations of
this period. It also influenced the themes of alienation, strangeness and
distance so common in the modernist writings. Raymond Williams is also critical
of ideological underpinnings of the entire retrospective project of
constructing modernism in a rather selective way.
Monroe K
Spears’s book Dionysus and the City (1970) like William’s work examines
the relationship between the Nietzschean
Dionysus and the context of urbanization in the development of modernism
in the West. He says,
‘ Dionysus presides
metaphorically over most of the recent trends in theater, from cruelty and
absurdity to audience participation, nudity, and the tribal rock musical. On
and off the stage, he is apparent in two contemporary figures: the black
militant, violently releasing dark and repressed forces both in society and
within psyche, and the rock musician, with his female devotees and his
orgiastic cult of collective emotion.’ (1970: 35)
Spears in his
discerning examination point out that the word City etymologically comes from
the civitas, city-state, which is properly an aggregation of cives,
citizens and the term civilization too comes from the same root. As a poetic
trope, it stands for both the city within and the city without. Spears, drawing
upon ideas from Walter Pater’s essay ‘ A Study of Dionysus’, comments that
modernism began when Dionysus entered the city. In earlier times, Civitas
Terrena or the Earthly City was seen as striving towards a Heavenly City, Civitas
Dei, but for moderns, says Prof Spears, it is seen as falling or fallen and
moving towards the Infernal City the City of Dis, the city of Dante and
Baudelaire, and of Eliot. In short, when the modernist poets paint the city in
dark and sinister colours, they are in many ways censuring and negating the
process of urbanization as well as the entire foundation of civilization, they
are criticizing the city within and without. If modern city stands for modernity,
then modernism, as a cultural movement often stands in contradiction and
negation to modernity.
This essential
link, which Williams and Spears underscore, between metropolis, which is both
capitalist and imperialist, and the modernist movement is decisive for analysis
of Modernism as an international movement as both capitalism and imperialism
have their impact on a transnational scale. Besides, what is termed Modernism
has achieved, in Williams’ words, ‘comfortable integration into the new international
capitalism’. He also remarks that Modernism is now canonized and its innovation
has become ‘ the new but fixed forms of our present moment.’ The well-known art
critic Harold Rosenberg, back in 1959 mentioned that ‘ The famous "modern break with tradition" has
lasted long enough to have produced its own tradition’ and it was possible to
speak paradoxically of the ‘tradition of the new.’ It will be useful to locate
Modernism in Indian languages within this ‘tradition of the new’. Though the
contours and specifics of Modernism in India will obviously.
However, the
relationship between the city and the village is crucial not just in analysis
of modernism, but also for entire literary historiography and historical
analysis of culture as demonstrated by Raymond Williams’ seminal book The
Country and the City (1973). Giving a lucid
and rigorous analysis of shifting values, perceptions and associations
of the opposition between the country and the city as embodied in English
literary history, Williams remarks that this contrast,’ is one of the major
forms in which we become conscious of a
central part of our experience and of the crises of our society’. (1973:289).
He argues that capitalism, as a mode of production, is the basic process of most
of what we know as the history of country and city. He cites Marx and Engels
from the Communist Manifesto where they say, ‘ the bourgeoisie has subjected
the country to the rule of the towns...has created enormous cities...has made
barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones.’
(1973:303). Williams, in spite of being a Marxist, is critical of the idea
implicit within Marxism and socialism, the avowed enemies of capitalism, in
their perception that the city is more ‘advanced and progressive’ than the
country because the industrial capitalism is a more progressive than the feudal
capitalism.
However, what
is important to us in our analysis of the relationship between modernism and
the city in the Indian context is Raymond Williams’s awareness of relevance of
this thesis to cultures beyond the British and the western culture. He is aware
of the fact that the historical process he is studying is ‘now effectively
international, means that we have more than material for interesting
comparisons. ‘(1973:292)
While it would
be illuminating to examine the imagery and sensibility associated with the
urban experience in the modernist Indian poetry, I would be delimiting myself
to Marathi poetry and the urban experience of Mumbai which happens to be India's
largest city, and the financial capital of the country, and also one of the
most important cultural centres of this country. It is the capital of the
Indian state of Maharashtra. The city proper has approximately 14 million
people and, along with the neighbouring suburbs of Navi Mumbai and Thane,
Mumbai forms the world's 4th largest urban agglomeration with around 19 million
people. Mumbai is the commercial and entertainment centre of India, generating
5% of India's GDP and accounting for 25% of industrial output, 40% of maritime
trade, and 70% of capital transactions to India's economy. Important financial
institutions such as the Reserve Bank of India, the Bombay Stock Exchange, the
National Stock Exchange of India and the corporate headquarters of many Indian
companies and numerous multinational corporations are based in this city.
India's Hindi film and television industry, or Bollywood is based in Mumbai.
Mumbai's business opportunities, as well as its potential to offer a better
standard of living, attract migrants from all over India and, in turn, make the
city an assortment of many communities and cultures.
Manya Joshi, a young
Mumbai based poet writes in a language that hardly looks like Marathi. The
changed metropolitan location deeply informs his poetry. I quote from his poem ‘Marathi Pauperized Me’. The
first line obviously is a take on the Kolatkar poem quoted in the beginning.
Marathi pauperized
me
So I fingered
English shit
My ass aches
From paying for
All escape routes
A white Mercedes
Smashes me to
smithereens
I know by heart
The success
stories chart
In the personality
development class-
-My worshiped
location
Ad copies of MNCs
Hold me under
their sway
I prognosticate
Oriental
revelation
Of virtual reality
In so-called alien
intelligence
The world is not
mean
But we are jerks
Manya Joshi’s poems often
touch upon the segregation of human being from a human being in the age of ‘communication’
revolution. His poem ‘ An Announcement for Mr and Mrs Limaye’ can be read as an
expression of alienation in the ‘global village’:
An Announcement for Mr. & Mrs. Limaye
i)
Mrs. Limaye aap jahan
Kahibhi ho forein
Mulund station par chale aaiye
Wahan aapke pati
Aapka intezaar kar rahe hai
ii)
Maalik who is sabka ek
Bang everyone
O Shirdi king Sai Baba bang bang
iii)
People lose their way
People lose each other
People make civil statements
On a superbuiltup world
iv)
In a public local train
There is an unimagined itchiness
On your private emotions
You mentally advertise it to yourself
v)
Mr. & Mrs. Limaye
Hiding behind popular philosophies
Wait for
Each other
Facing each other.
The poem which mixes up
registers and languages expresses how people lose each other and are alienated
from one another. In spite of being a very small world, a married couple
travelling in Mumbai suburban train fails to recognize each other on the
crowded railway platform. Manya Joshi’s perception of the predicament of alienation
in the ‘super built up’ world is not celebratory. It is a rather agonizing
situation from which even Sai Baba cannot save us.
Manya, one of the most
experimental poets today, employs the post modernist device of pastiche and
collage in his poems by drolly using incoherent and queer fragments from
various languages like English and Urdu mixed with Mumbai slang. He freely
sprinkles the indigested terms from the Western literary theory flavoured with
sarcasm and irreverence. The language of his poems is extremely hybrid and
heterogeneous.
Vrajesh Solanki uses a
similar post modernist device of pastiche and collage in one of this poems
entitled ‘ Poems of Advertisements’:
About films: wanted boys and girls for a new TV
serial,
Smart, young, having a good command over language,
contact us
With your photo for the screen test. Earn! Earn! Earn!
Ten thousand a month.
A golden
opportunity for the unemployed. Education no bar. A company
With American
base wants sales boys and sales girls for door-to-door marketing.
Meet with your bio-data. Vasai: the second Konkan.
Green heaven restaurant
Just five minutes from the station. Recognized by
Sidco. Twenty-four water supply.
With ultra modern amenities. Loan facility available.
Booking open. Are you depressed?
Take two pills of super deluxe before sleep and
experience the power and strength
Which you once had. Internet marriage:
www.marathilagna.com 45/55 Maratha caste
Fill up online forms. Regarding the change of names:
I, vithya dagdo gaitonde
From today
onwards will be called vikas dagdo gaitonde as per
Maharastra gazette no. xxxx dated xx/xx/xx. Sanju,
please come back
From wherever you are, your mummy and papa are waiting
for you. Entire Patil family.
Solve the crossword no.514 please don’t send it to our
office address or try to contact
Our office regarding the same.
Vrajesh‘s
poetry expresses his anger and suffocation of living in a dehumanizing and fake
cultural and social environment. Mumbai, the gigantic metropolis comes out as a
bewildering mega machine through the eyes of lesser-privileged sections of the
population that Vrajesh represents to an extent. Interestingly, Vrajesh’s first
language is Gujarati and he writes excellent Marathi.
Poems of Hemant Divate are
concerned directly with the urban social and cultural landscape transformed by
the forces of globalization and privatization. In his poem ‘ Even Here He Gets
Fucked’ he talks about how these large scale processes have eroded and damaged
personal relationships:
I now live in an
e-world
breathing e-air
whose naturalness
I no longer trust.
When I take air in
and throw it out,
I hardly realize
when it becomes
breath,
Likewise, when I
trickle from space
into cyber space
along with the
sound of the cursor
and try to reach
the given address
I don't find you
there.
One more
relationship is dragged away
into the junk
mail.
In the poem titled ‘
Shopping at Mega-Mall’, the speaker realizes that he has turned into a
commodity a consumer item and is being displayed in the mega mall.
I am Whisper Sanitary Napkin
Lying on the first rack
And I am dreaming of living very close to a young girl
Absorbing her juices.
Or that I am a Huggies Nappy Pad on the second rack
And I am accumulating the excreta as I snuggle
some infant
Who I look after tenderly
For five to six hours.
Or I am a high-priced toilet soap
Camay, Yardley or Lux International
The consumer becomes the
consumed; the subject becomes the object, not just any object but an object to
be sold in a flashy wrapper as the entire world turns into a one huge
Mega-mall. This indeed is a dehumanizing predicament.
Or I am the television
And the entire family is sitting in front of me
Eating and surfing my channels
Or that they have switched me off
And have left me alone in this room
Or that I am a foot wipe
Costing twelve bucks
Given free with a purchase
Of upholstery
Good looking
Yet my master coming out of the bathroom
Is wiping his wet feet on me
Or that I am a broom
With which the folks
Are causally cleaning their floor
Or dusting away cobwebs.
My mistress drops me
While using me
And dreams of a vacuum cleaner.
She spits on me
Even if I touch her husband's body
By mistake.
This sense of
commodification of self is also an awareness of being used, abused and used as
a foot wipe. The last stanza quoted above is almost an example of Dalit poetry,
where the owner of the broom spits on it dreaming of vacuum cleaner. The
consciousness of the dehumanizing, asphyxiating and sinister aspects of
globalization pervades poetry of many contemporary poets like Hemant Divate.
References
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2010
___________. Kala
Ghoda Poems. Mumbai, Clearing House, 2009
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Nigel Wood. Eds. Modern Criticism and
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Literature and the Modern World: Critical
Essays and Documents, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990
Dilip Chitre. As Is, Where Is. Selected Poems. Mumbai:
Poetrywala Publications, 2007
__________ Shesha. Selected Marathi Poems. Mumbai:
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___________ ed. An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1945-65).
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______________. ,’ The Politics of
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Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp 47-53
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and the Metropolis’ and ‘When Was Modernism’ in Dennis Walder ed. 1990, pp 164-170
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And trans. Live Update: An Anthology
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Life. Poetrywala, Mumbai, 2007
___________________ed. Indian English Poetry Since 1950: an Anthology, Hyderabad: Disha
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WW Norton and Company,2001
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