tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90007845621487335362024-02-07T22:16:01.022-08:00Imaginary Maps of Unknown TerritoriesMy published writings. Critical articles, fiction etc.Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9000784562148733536.post-6538195607890444582012-12-27T21:41:00.002-08:002012-12-27T21:41:19.380-08:00WARPS AND WEFTS OF LITERARY TRADITIONS: TOWARDS AN INTERLITERARY FRAMEWORK FOR INDIAN LITERARY STUDIES<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">I define ‘Indian Literature’ as a network of interliterary
processes and communities, against which the individuality of the individual
literatures on the sub-continent can be understood. The conventional
definitions of the term have often considered it as a ‘category’ or as elusive essence
of some abstract quality of‘Indianness’ which seem to reside in the individual
literatures. The present working definition avoids the sterile and
nationalistic ‘ unity vs. diversity’ debates by contrasting the shared and the
overlapping literary elements with those which are distinctly ‘
intra-literary’. The shared or the interliterary processes do not signify a ‘unity’;
in fact, they can be understood only in the context of differences and fluid boundaries
of linguistic, cultural and artistic processes. The interliterary approach
focuses on the literary phenomenon as ‘processes’ rather than as products and
hence avoids ‘essentializing’ tendencies of the conventional way of thinking
about Indian literature.</span></div>
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The need to study Indian literatures in wider comparative
framework has often been reiterated by renowned scholars of comparative
literature like Sisir Kumar Das, Amiya Dev , GN Devy, Chandra Mohan and AK
Singh. However, an elaborate theoretical framework for analysis of
interliterary relationships in the Indian context which accounts for parallels,
affinities and divergences is missing. I propose that the theoretical notion of
interliterariness as elaborated by the renowned Slovak comparativist Dionyz
Durisin (1984) which highlights the interconnectedness and interactional
relationships between multiple literary, cultural and social processes is of
significant theoretical utility in comprehension of the most of the important
literary phenomena on the Indian subcontinent. The notion can be understood as
being dialectically related to the notion of ‘intra-literary’ processes. It provides
a comparative framework to analyze literary texts, movements, literary cultures
in India by focusing on the complex historical interplay of diverse literary,
artistic and intellectual traditions which often collide, overlap, blend and
give rise to hybrid aesthetics and heterogeneous cultural formations which
cannot be understood in isolation or as monolith belonging simply to a single
literary tradition or language.</div>
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Dioynz Durisin in <i>Theory of Literary Comparatistics</i>
(1984), defines 'literary process' as the " inner laws of development of
literature." He elaborates upon the goal of literary studies,and
comparative literature is" to comprehend the literary phenomenon means not
merely to describe its constituents, or to point out their mutual affinity and
interdependence within the work of literature, but to reveal the multifarious
affinities of the literary phenomenon and the individual procedures with the
social, cultural, artistic and literary background in the widest sense of the
word". (p. 11). He distinguishes
interliterary relationships into two interconnected and overlapping fields:
those resemblances caused by genetic (contactual) relationships and literary
resemblances (analogies) brought about by typological affinities. The genetic (
contactual) relationship in his theory does not imply the search for ‘origins’
and ‘influences’, but describes ‘ the coherence of the work of literature with
preceding tradition…i.e. the relationships which one way or another
participated in bringing it into being” (105).”
He notes, “Contactual study takes into consideration various forms of
literary reception, while in typological study, we speak of literary analogies,
affinities or inaffinities. While the forms of literary reception express a
certain degree of direct contact, the typological analogies represent a
considerably freer similarity, not determined by direct contact or genetically”
( 193).</div>
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He further distinguishes two forms of ‘contactual/genetic’
relationships into external contactual and internal contactual relationships.
The external contactual relations would include things like “various reports
and mention of the literature of other countries, actual contacts between
writers and persons of letters, literary critical and literary historical
studies of phenomena of foreign literatures and so forth’, while the ‘internal
contactual relationships’ are ‘immediate’ and find their reflection and
application in the actual structure of the literary phenomenon. One can discern
a greater degree of involvement of foreign values in literary phenomenon like
the works or literary movements.This distinction of contactual relationship is
crucial for Durisin because ,” it is not only important as regards the degree
to which foreign literary values participate in the formation of the
developmental processes of the recipient literature, but also from that of the
definition of the inner potentialities of the giving phenomenon for taking
effect within the bounds of the native land” The internal contacts have
received substantial attention from the scholars of comparative literature,
however, according to Durisin there is always a danger of being mechanistic
and positivistic in the search for
influences. Durisin lays stress on the historical , social and cultural contexts and reciprocality of
these literary resemblances, which in his view, eliminates the danger of being
a ‘influence” hunter. (107). Durisin also points out the very crucial role of
the recipient literature and resulting selective standpoint which determines
and shapes the ‘internal contactual’ relationships. With regards to the
relationship between the recipient milieu and the giving phenomena, he proceeds
to make another significant distinction between ‘ direct’ or immediate contact
or ‘intermediated’ contact. The direct contact reflect “ an immediate
relationship to the literary values of other national literature and assume
direct contact with the original work”, while in the mediated contact, the role
of mediators and modes of mediation ( like informatory reports, news items and
translation) is of great importance. If the intermediatory link belongs to a
third national literature, the examination of its role becomes the part of the
study of what Durisin calls the processes of world literature. ( 124-125)
Durisin further differentiates the typological resemblances as being brought
about by social, literary and psychological conditionalities. The
socio-typological analogies for Durisin mean “general social conditionality of
literary typological affinities, the roots of which lie in ideological factors
relating to social ideas. Although this appears throughout the structure of the
work of art, it is usually most intense in the intellectual constituents, reflecting
the philosophy of the times and the artists’ Weltanschauung. We can include
here those phenomena which reflect the individual forms of social consciousness
and which find a specific application in literature.”(197). </div>
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Durisin (273-275) also provides an interesting theorization of
the notion of ‘interliterary communities’, the communities which share
interliterary processes and the communities which are related in an
interlitrary way. He classifies various types of interliterary communities like
those communities which are ‘ethnically related national wholes, living in a
single state unit’ and those communities which are ethnically kindered nations
which do not share co-existence in a common constitutional unit. The
communities in a state, like various linguistic groups belonging to the nation
India, form a relations of kinship by common political and social destiny.
Durisin also notes how certain communities having no social or ethical bond
become interliterary due to history and
form a common constitutinal unit. The example can be of the colonial the
colonized relationship between the United Kingdom and India.</div>
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This theoretical schema can be usefully deployed in analysis of
most of the significant literary phenomena on the subcontinent. For instance, the
Bhakti movement which contributed immensely to the development of the modern
Indian languages and literatures can be fruitfully viewed as an interliterary
phenomenon. Many of the Bhakti texts bear an intertextual relationship with the
pan-Indian sanskrtitic heritage consisting of important cultural texts like the
vedic texts, the puranas, the epics and the classical Kavya literature.
Important themes, motifs, metaphors and symbols from this heritage are integral
to the structure of Bhakti poetry. This ‘internal contactual relationship’ of
the Bhakti poetry in the modern Indian languages with the Sanskritic heritage
is a typical case. At the same time,
what Durisin terms as ‘external contactual relationships’ proliferated owing to
the fact that the Bhakti composers were pilgrims and wandered far and wide on
the subcontinent. The Marathi Bhakti poet Namdeo left his mark not just on the
Sikh scriptures in Panjab, but also seems to have contributed to Gujarati
Vaishanava Bhakti as can be discerned in the use of Marathi lexical items and
inflections in the works of Narsinh Mehta. Narsinh’s famous composition ‘Jala
Kamal Chandi Ja Ne <i>Bala’</i> uses the word ‘bala’ for affectionately
addressing the child Krishna. The Marathi inflection ‘ cha’ in the signature
line of Narsinh Mehta’s poetry as ‘ Narsaiya-cha swami’ is another illustration
of the contactual relationship between Gujarati and Marathi. Another example
can be of Kabir who is a major presence on the Bhakti poetry in most of the
Indian languages. The social typological affinity lies in the politics of caste
which is pervasive on the subcontinent and the Bhakti movement often rebelled
against the caste, class and gender discrimination. The literary analogies can
be found in similar literary devices and genres of the oral tradition of the
Bhakti poetry. Durisin’s notion of interliterary communities can provide us a
dynamic model to map the shifting linguistic and cultural communities
funtioning in an interliterary modes in the pre-colonial times.</div>
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The colonial encounter was a distinctive type of interliterary
‘contact’ which is studied at length by the postcolonial theorists. This
contact was both ‘external’ as well as ‘internal’ and the politically unequal
relationship between the giving phenomena and the receiving phenomena was both
‘ direct’ and ‘mediated’. This contact resulted not just in new literary forms
but also newer forms of social, cultural and intellectual life on the
subcontinent. The ‘modern’ literary forms like the novel, the short story or
the modern drama emerged out of this ‘colonial contact’. These newer literary
forms were not derivative or slavishly imitative as some people would believe .
As Durisin stresses the significance of the recipient literature and resulting
selective standpoint which determines and shapes the ‘internal contactual’
relationships. Which means the native literary traditions and the
‘intraliterary’ processes play a crucial role in determining the reception of
the foreign forms and shapes them in a distinctive manner? The analysis and
description of the emergence of the modern novel in Indian languages by
Meenakshi Mukherjee in her <i>Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in
India</i> (1985) can be seen as an interliterary account of the rise of a
literary form in India. The account does not uses Durisin’s schema but does
depict how the native narrative traditions combined with the foreign ones to
produce works like <i>Indulekha</i> which were also at times superior to the
novels they claimed to be inspired by. The problem with the ‘influence’ theory
of ‘cause-effect’ explanation of this interliterary transaction is that it
automatically privileges the ‘ influencer’, which in this case, is not
surprisingly the cultural form of the colonizer over the ‘influenced’ which
happens to be the colonized. Durisin’s model which stresses the historical and
social contexts of this interliterary interaction which enables us a better
understanding of the processes. </div>
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One can also analyze the phenomenon of ‘modernism’ in Indian
literatures as an example of interliterary phenomena. Bholabhai Patel (1989:
251-261) has discussed how Baudelaire and Tagore were major influences on the
emergence of the modern Gujarati poetry. He also notes how translations of
Baudelaire, Eliot and Rilke and the poems on the Western poets and the Greek
myths were common in both the languages. The western avant-garde modernist
literature combined with the avant-garde literature in other Indian languages
overlapped to produce the Indian version of the international modernist movement.
Howerver, the literary resemblances were not merely due to ‘contactual’
relationships but also due to ‘analogical and typological parrallels in many
social processes like urbanization, industrialization and the global
catastrophic events like the world war II. The distinctive history of the
subcontinent also created a ground for the reception of the international
modernist movement. As Patel notes, “Independence uncovered us totally, without
reservation. Independence and Partition, and with that urbanization and
industrialization, shook the creative sensibility of the poet to the roots; and
it became urgent for him to explore new poetic
techniques to express his new and sharpened mental states…..he was in
tune with Baudelaire’s urban consciousness..(257)”. Almost similar stories can
be narrated about the rise of the modernist literatures in other Indian
languages like Marathi where the modernist poets like BS Mardhekar, Dilip
Chitre and Arun Kolatkar wrote in the similar contexts. The interliterary relationships with the
western poetic and intellectual movements like Imagism, surrealism, Dadaism, existentialism,
psychoanalysis, Marxism and phenomenology is commonplace in most of the Indian
literatures after Independence. Calling
these relationships as ‘influences’ hardly helps us to analyze the specifics
and the concrete manifestations of the hybrid and heterogeneous poetics and
politics of the period. The analysis of the external contactual relationships
like the visits of the Indian writers and intellectuals to the west ( like
Mardhekar’s visit to England, or Dilip Chitre’s visit to Iowa Creative Writing
Program) and the foreign writer’s visit to India( like Allen Ginsberg’s visit
to India and his contact with many Indian writers during the sixties) or the
correspondence between writers can help us to understand the phenomenon of the
modernism in a more useful way. The analysis of <i>distinctive typological
inaffinites and divergences</i> at social and historical level can help us to
understand the differences in production, consumption and circulation of
modernist discourses in various Indian languages. It can explain the reasons
behind Bholabhai Patel’s observation that modernism in Gujarati was a late
arrival compared to Bengali. It can also help us to comprehend the affinities
and divergences between the little magazine movements in Indian languages like
Marathi, Gujarati and Bengali. The
social typological affinities and convergences in modernism owes a lot to the
similar interliterary and interlingual history of the languages. The
overlapping histories of colonialism, nationalism, the rise of linguistic
chauvinism leading to the linguistic formation of the states, the impact of
partition, the so called ‘ Green Revolution’ , caste-based social and electoral
politics, the impact of Indo-China war etc can help us understand the
convergences and divergences of modernism in various Indian languages in a more
comprehensive way. The view of ‘ Indian
Literature’ as consisting of a groups of of ‘interliterary communities’ living
under the state unit and sharing similar political and social destiny can help
us to map the concrete dynamics of the significant interliterary procesess (
like modernism, dalit and the feminist literatures).</div>
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This framework can also help us to analyze the later interliterary
movements like the Dalit movements, nativisms, feminism by focuses in various
kinds of contactual relationships between literatures and various kinds of
typological analogies conditioned by social and cultural similarities and
differences. The framework can help us to focus on the concrete contacts and
analogies instead of the vague ‘cause effect’ theorization of ‘influences’. It
can help us to overcome the implicit hierarchization in the discussion of
‘influence’ and concentrate on actual events, texts and interactions rather
than impressionistic narrative of influence studies. Durisin’s theorization of
the notion of interliterary communities is also of significant utility to study
the interliterary relationships on the subcontinent and also to map historical
shifts and mutations of the dynamic interliterary processes on the
subcontinent. This sort of historical mapping of the warps and wefts of
literary procesess will take us step closer in writing a comprehensive history
of Indian literatures. </div>
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Refrences</div>
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Abhai Maurya. <i>Confluence:
Historico-Comparative and Other Literary Studies</i>. New Delhi: Sterling
Publishers Pvt. Ltd.,1988<o:p></o:p></div>
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Amiya Dev and Sisir Kumar Das (ed.) <i>Comparative
Literature: Theory and Practice</i>, IIAS, Shimla and Allied Publications, 1989<o:p></o:p></div>
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Bholabhai Patel,’The Emergence of Modernity in
Gujarati and Bengali Poetry” Dev and Das eds. 1989, 251-262<o:p></o:p></div>
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Dionyz Durisin, <i>Theory of Literary Comparatistics</i>,
Veda, House of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislavia, 1984, Trans. Jessie
Jocmanova<o:p></o:p></div>
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Marian Galik, “ Interliterariness as a Concept in
Comparative Literature”, CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture, ISSN
1481-4374, 2000<o:p></o:p></div>
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____________“ East-West Interliterariness: A
Theoretical and a Historical Overview” in Dev and Das eds. 1989, 116-128<o:p></o:p></div>
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Meenakshi Mukherjee in her <i>Realism and Reality: The
Novel and Society in India</i> (1985)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Sisir Kumar Das, “Why Comparative Indian Literature”,
in Dev and Das ed. 1989,94-105<span style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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( Published in Sahitya Vithika, Praveshank, Ardhavaarshik Antarrashtriya Shodh Patrika, Varsh: 1, Ank: 1, Decemeber 2012, Peer Reviewed Bilingual Bi-Annual Research Journal, Vallabh Vidya Nagar, Ed. Dr. Dilip Mehra, ISSN: 2319-6513)</div>
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Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9000784562148733536.post-90068341948574850362012-12-27T21:37:00.002-08:002012-12-27T21:37:41.578-08:00Translating Creative and Critical Texts: Theorizing the Difference<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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As a practicing
poet, critic and translator, I feel that though these are distinct activities,
all of them have elements of creativity, critical thinking and intercultural
aspects common to them. These elements of course vary in proportion. Creative
writing involves critical labour, as Eliot pointed out. Critical writings involve
creativity of reading and creativity of presentation. Both these activities
have intercultural dimensions. Translation involves a high degree of
creativity, critical sense and intercultural awareness, probably more than the
other two activities. However, this does not mean that they are indistinct or
homogenous activities. I think of them, in Wittgensteinian way, as being
different ‘language games’ with only a faint ‘family resemblance’ to one
another.</div>
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As a translator
of Gujarati literature, I have translated short stories of noted writers like
Nazir Mansuri and Mona Patrawalla and poetry of Narsinh Mehta apart from the
contemporary poets like Mangal Rathod, Rajesh Pandya, Rajendra Patel and Jaidev
Shukla. I have translated a good amount of contemporary Marathi poetry. </div>
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However, my
experience of translating critical prose is fairly limited. Thanks to persuasion
of Prof Rakesh Desai, I translated two articles on Narmad by Bhagwatikumar
Sharma and Gulabdas Broker. I have also translated an essay by Ashok Vajpai
into Marathi titled ‘Kavita Main Kya Hota hai’. In short I have some experience
of translating both the kinds of texts: creative and critical texts. </div>
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Whether
translation of critical prose differs substantially from creative writing
ultimately depends upon whether you conceive of critical writing as being
distinct from creative one. What I have to say here is in no way new or
original. In fact, for many who are not conversant with the implications of
literary theories, what I say may sound obvious. However, the postmodern theory
has radically questioned what we have taken for granted or taken for obvious
and hence, I have framed this discussion around the theoretically assumptions
of poststructuralist theory. </div>
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In the present
paper, I argue that the abstract postmodernist and poststructuralist theories
of literature which seek to erase the distinction between the literary and the
non-literary or critical are of little use to me as a translator working with
concrete texts. It is ironical how often the poststructuralist theoreticians
who celebrate contradiction and difference are only too willing to erase the
distinction between the artistic and the non-artistic. This impulse probably
owes something to the postmodern condition which has played a crucial role in
establishment of poststructuralist theory. </div>
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The formalist
view of literary text as self-referential and autonomous, and the
poststructuralist view texts as essentially intertextual seem theoretically
irreconcilable. One is left in a theoretical <i>aporia</i> as the literary text seems to be paradoxically <i>both</i>: a self referential and autonomous
order, AND an intextual entity. </div>
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However, I
believe that this paradoxical and self-contradictory nature of the literary
texts <i>sets it apart from the non-literary
ones</i>. This means though the literary
texts are intertextual, they are primarily self-referential and
self-sufficient. They are primarily about themselves. On the other hand
critical texts are primarily about other texts. This is other way of saying what
is traditionally believed of the difference between literature and criticism:
literature is ‘autotelic’ and autonomous, criticism is parasitic, depending on
literary texts for sustenance. </div>
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However, though
the distinction is theoretically a contentious one, it is still a useful one
empirically. At least, in the context of
the texts I have translated. </div>
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Consider, for
instance a passage from Mona Patrawalla short story ‘The Clasps’:</div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">It was not yet midnight; even then the village was
dead silent. In the dark and cold <i>Margshirsh</i>
night, the village stood as if, frozen, amid the dense sag, <i>mahuda</i> and bamboo forest. On the
Valsad-Billimora highway, trucks laden with timber stolen from the outskirts of
the village droned occasionally, honking and quaking the whole village. After
they were gone and there was the immense silence again. Plains surrounded the
village and then the Sahyadri valleys and mountains enfolded it. These hills seemed to embrace the village
full of small mud huts with their roofs of paddy straw. Bamboo groves
surrounded the entire village as if they were ubiquitous <i>bhungara</i> cacti. It was a large village. Soon after nightfall, the
village guards would light and hang up the lanterns on the poles. Then the
whole village fell silent. If one had not
seen the lanterns hanging or bells ringing behind the <i>chippa</i> carts bound to the <i>hatwada</i>,
he would be terrified to death at the sight of lone lantern approaching in the
night. Besides, there was the crematory near the river Kavery behind the
village. Many people lost their lives by drowning in the depths of this river.
So the horror of ghosts, spirits or <i>chudels
</i>would make the villagers peer into the darkness. The needle of suspicion, however, would all
the time point towards Kanta, the witch.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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In spite of
intertextual allusions to things like Margashirsh and stories of ghosts, the
passage is designed to create a self sufficient world in which the narrative
occurs. The primary purpose of such a passage is to evoke an aesthetic response
to a sinister and dark world of Kanta.</div>
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On the other
hand consider a critical text on Narmad by Bhagwatikumar Sharma: </div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">The disposition for social reformation and for
combating social evils of the age was so deeply ingrained and powerful in the
poet Narmad that he could not remain content with literary compositions, essays
and lectures. Hence it was inevitable that he would enter the field of
journalism. In fact, it would have been surprising had Narmad not turned out to
be a journalist. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">The germs of journalistic temperament are extensively
found in Narmad’s nature, in his activities and in his prose style. He was by
nature a person of ‘Josso’- the irrepressible spirit. He was by innate nature
given to opposing social evils and to promoting social reforms. He was often
impulsive, impatient, decisive and completely unafraid. These are considered to
be essential qualifications of a true journalist and so these traits molded the
journalist in him. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Though there is
a narrative side to this discourse, the intention is not to create a seemingly
autonomous world as can been found in the earlier discourse. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Even when there
is quaint sort of archaic rhetoric in Gulabdas Broker’s essay ‘Narmad: The
Renaissance Man’, the rhetoric is not exactly ‘poetic’:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Narmad was undoubtedly a poet. He might not have
polished much of his writing, but even then he was a poet. There wasn’t much
possibility of doing so in those times. Though many of his poems are definitely
uncouth, there can be no denying the fact that he was a poet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">He was a dauntless man- though he may have been
conceited at times, and often he might have fought the battles which were not
his, yet one cannot deny the fact that whenever time came to fight, he was not
the one to run away.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Though he might not be much of a scholar in the true
sense of the word, but he was unquestionably a complete connoisseur of
knowledge. As he was working with scarce resources of his times, it was
difficult to do sound scholarly work in the up-coming field of literary
studies. Yet whatever work that he did,
like preparing the dictionary, writing about prosody, studying the folklore, researching the old poetry,
reflecting upon history and so on, it was not possible to do these things
without deep interest, passion and understanding of these subjects.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
One notices that
the literary and the critical are two distinctive discourses, differing in the
form, content and function from each other and can be marked by distinct
rhetorical strategies. The translator has to be aware of the distinct nature of
rhetoricity of two kinds of discourses. The literary texts are far more
artistically complex and self-sufficient than the critical ones. In Jakobson’s
terminology (1960), the critical discourses privilege the ‘referential
function’ of language while the poetic use of language focuses on ‘the message
for its own sake’. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Having said this
let me add that there are many kinds of creative texts and there are many kinds
of critical texts and translator has to be aware of these differences within
the categories. There is no need to point out that translating a <i>Ulysses</i> or <i>Finnegan’s’ Wake </i>is more difficult than translating Jane Austen or
Thomas Hardy, or that translating Harold Bloom or Jacques Derrida would be
obviously more difficult than translating Gulabdas Broker or Bhagwatikumar
Sharma. The strategies and devices of the translator also vary from text to
text.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
My personal
belief is that the translators of literary texts have to be creative writers in
the first place. Though this may sound dogmatic, very often, the translator who
has no experience of creative writing has no idea why and how literary devices
are employed and what is the significance of those devices. The non-literary
translator may not need to know how symbolism, archetypal patterns, or
metaphors function in poetry or how narrative techniques of flashback or foreshadowing function in fictional work or
what is the significance of such devices in the totality of the literary text.
However, such a knowledge is prerequisite for the literary translators. Hence,
one can expect a bilingual short story writer to translate short story more
effectively than the translator who has no experience in writing short stories.
One can expect a bilingual poet to be a better translator of poetry than a
person who has no experience of writing poetry. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
This means a
literary translator ought to have literary competence, that is, not just the
knowledge of literary devices, their function and significance in the totality
of a text but also the knowledge of <i>how
to use them</i> in an appropriate ways. After all, he is writing a new short
story, novel or a poem. It implies that the literary translator ought to be
much more than a critic. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
The theoretical
question whether the literary and the non-literary discourses and consequently
the literary and the non-literary translation are essentially different can be
conceived of in a Wittgensteinian way. The literary and the critical discourses
may not be ‘essentially’ different from each other, but are two different
‘language games’. The similarity within the categories of the literary and the
non-literary can be explained in the terms of ‘family resemblances’
(Wittgenstein, 1958:31) rather than essences. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
If literary and
non-literary translations are two different language games, it means that there
is an element of dexterity and skill involved in playing those games and some
players are more skilled than others. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<b>REFERENCES<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Ludwig Wittgenstein, <u>Philosophical
Investigation</u>. Trans. GEM Anscombe, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed, <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Oxford</st1:place></st1:city>: Blackwell Publishers, 1958<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Roman Jakobson Closing statements:
Linguistics and Poetics, <u>Style in language</u>, T.A. Sebeok, New-York, 1960.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%;">T.A. Sebeok. <u> Style in language</u>, New-York, 1960.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<span style="line-height: 24px; text-align: justify;">(Published in 'Between the Self and the Other: Translation as Praxis' ed. Rakesh Desai, New Delhi: Saroop Book Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2013)</span></div>
Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9000784562148733536.post-21615330587414581282012-10-04T23:25:00.002-07:002012-10-04T23:25:25.639-07:00Imaginary Maps of Unknown Territories: Food Chain and Indian Poetry<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px; text-indent: -0.25in;">(From </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px; text-indent: -0.25in;">“Imaginary Maps of Unknown Territories: Food Chain and Indian Poetry”</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px; text-indent: -0.25in;"> </span><i style="line-height: 24px; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">On the Fringes: Marginalized Voices in English Literature,</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px; text-indent: -0.25in;"> Eds. Capt. Dr. Arvind M. Nawale, Dr. Sheeba Rakesh, New Delhi: Authorspress, New Delhi, 2012, ISBN 978-81-7273-657-6). </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 24px; text-indent: -0.25in;">The paper was presented at " </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: left;">Marginality and Indian Poetry, Kavi Bharati-5, organized by Vagarth, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal. 20 March 2010</span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">When I was asked
to make a presentation on ' Marginality and Indian Poetry’, I was </span><span style="line-height: 24px;">wonder-struck</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"> at
the sheer quantity of my ignorance on the topic. Frankly, the three terms in
the title ' marginality’, `Indian’ and ` poetry’ are marvelously abstract and
vague and I have a feeling that all the three are, like most of the terms used
in intellectual and non-intellectual discourses, metaphorical. The utility of
these terms, in spite of their abstract and metaphorical nature, is similar to
that of maps. Maps may not be territories, but it is better to venture with
some, however inaccurate, than with none. But that does not mean we should not
modify the maps as new knowledge and information comes up. Though maps create
an illusion of fixity, they are remarkably unfixed. No sailor these days uses
the maps used by Marco Polo or Columbus- except, of course, in literary
studies.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Northrop Frye expresses
his bafflement about the lack of word for a work of literary art similar to
Aristotle’s use of the word ` poem’ (1957:71). Bhamaha (6<sup>th</sup> cent)
uses the term ` <i>Kavya’</i> to talk about all literary art including prose, verse,
dance and drama of all kinds. <i>Kavya</i> is not poetry because somehow the
term poetry is still fixated with the notion of verse. However, the distinction
between the artistic use of language and non-artistic use of language is fuzzy
rather than binary. Consequently, the map of poetry does not have clearly
defined borders. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
In the
post-global world, one might have to consider the works of the visual artists
and poets like Eduardo Kac, with his experiments with `holo-poetry’, ` space
poetry’, `biopoetry’, `nano-poetry’ and `transgenic poetry’ seriously within
the expanding domains of poetry. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
I ask myself
what territory does the term ` India’ or ` Indian’ map? Does it cover Sindhi,
Bangla or Urdu literature written outside the present day political map of
India? What about literature written in today’s Pakistan or Bangladesh before
1947? Does the term ` Indian literature’ cover the oral literatures and
folklore of hundreds of `minor’ languages on the subcontinent? Is English an
Indian language? What makes people like Salman Rushdie or Jhumpa Lahiri or VS
Naipaul ` Indian’? Is Manto or Faiz Indian? Can you classify the Bhakti poetry
as religious literature? Can you term the Vedic literature as `poetry’? It
seems that the political maps, geographical maps, cultural maps, linguistic
maps, civilizational maps and historical maps just don’t coincide and because
they don’t coincide it is impossible to make a homogenous and unity category
called ` Indian’. The problem with the ` unity in diversity theory’ of Indian
Literature is that it is sufficiently abstract to include all literature in the
world and not just Indian literature. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
In spite of
differences, all literatures in the world will have some sameness at some level
of abstraction. Borges’s celebrated short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
suggests that all literature in the world can be seen as being composed by a
single anonymous author. In spite of all
politics of difference, there is always a possibility of imagining this single
anonymous author. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
However, the
dynamics of the histories, poetics and politics which govern most of the
literatures on the Indian sub-continent are amazingly different. The languages
I work with: Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi and English have such startling differences in terms of
aesthetics, sociology, histories and geographies that I have wondered whether they
are comparable sets at all. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
For instance,
the significance of the term of ` Dalit’ literature in Marathi and Gujarati is
entirely different. For some reasons, I am more comfortable with the term `
Ambedkarite’ literature, than the Dalit literature. In Marathi, a writer who does not belong to
the castes classified as Dalit does not get classified as a Dalit writer, whereas,
in Gujarati, the writers from communities which are not Dalit are included in
the Dalit literary canon. I deliberately speak of Dalit `Canon’ because there
seem to be rules of inclusion and exclusion (euphemisms for discrimination)
functioning within the Dalit category, and the politics of discrimination
within the Dalit literary canon is also on the basis of caste identity and
caste hierarchy. This means one can think of `more equals’ and `less equals’
among Dalits. The Vankar community in Gujarat and the Mahars in Maharashtra has
occupied a dominant place in the cluster of communities labeled as the Dalits. Though
all subalterns are equal, some seem to be more equal than others. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
This brings me
to the problematic notion of ` marginality’. The term ` margin’ is a spatial
metaphor. And it seems to me that the metaphor of ` centre’ and ` margin’ is
built on two dimensional model of space. It is high time we point out relativism
within this model and notice that <i>what is central and what is marginal
depends entirely on the position of the observer</i>. If the observer is placed
closer to point A, then the point B will automatically be seen as further away
from A and hence marginal. If one positions oneself closer, to say, Indian
Writing in English, the Mahabharata composed in a Bhili language will be seen
as marginal. What most of people forget that when they classify a certain
literature as `marginal’ they are still speaking from the point of view of the
central. They are speaking from the point A. There is an implicit recognition of a
particular tradition as central in classifying something as marginal. Here in
lies the paradox of political correctness: when you are recognizing certain
discourse as marginal you are reinforcing the centrality of the other
discourse. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Consider the
duality between ` the mainstream’ and ` the Dalit literature.’ When one
considers the Dalit literature as marginal, one is agreeing implicitly to the
idea that other forms of discourses are central, when the whole idea of
centrality and marginality is actually a relative one. `Mainstream’ for whom?
`Dalit’ for whom? Are the questions not pursued to their logical
conclusion. When you classify something
as marginal, you are automatically classifying something as central. When one
is culturally closer to the oral performer performing the <i>Bhili</i>
Mahabharata, Shashi Tharoor’s <i>Great Indian Novel</i> becomes marginal and
even irrelevant. It is only when one implicitly accepts Tharoor’s <i>Great
Indian Novel</i> as dominant text; one can consider its other as marginal. Which
means this perception is actually reinforcing the marginality and secondary
status of the text. Condescending nature
of glorification of the Dalit literature in English studies today can seen as
an example of backdoor Brahmanism because the Dalit literature is seen as `marginal’
from what English studies recognize as the central discourse, which means the
English studies still decides what is central and what is peripheral . </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
I would also
like to draw attention to relativism implicit in other congenital metaphors
like ` subalternity’ or `minority’. While the languages like Marathi would be
seen as subaltern vis-à-vis English or French, a tribal language in Maharashtra
would be seen as subaltern vis-à-vis Marathi and a smaller tribal language
would be seen as subaltern vis-à-vis larger tribal languages. Once we recognize
that all points on the sphere are both central and marginal at the same time,
we will notice that some points will always appear peripheral from any point,
we will rethink the politics based on this metaphor. Most of the so called
radical discourses which seek out to interrogate the dominant discourses
circuitously reinforce the dominant status of the discourses by assuming that
the particular discourses are central and particular discourses are marginal.
We all know that though subalterns speak in various languages, the subaltern
historians always speak in English and that too right from the top of the
social, cultural and economic food chain. The food-chain, thus, is not only
conserved, but also reinforced by the so-called radical discourses.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<b>Notes:<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Frye,
Northrop. <u>Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays</u>. Princeton University Press,
Princeton: New Jersey, 1957, p.71 <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Kac,
Eduardo. Ed. <u>Media Poetry: An International Anthology.</u> Chicago;
University of Chicago Press, 2007<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">_____________,
Space Poetry, on Kac’s website ekac.org URL:
http://www.ekac.org/spacepoetry.html<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">_____________, Biopoetry.
http://www.ekac.org/biopoetry.html<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9000784562148733536.post-39527382596035036542012-10-04T23:18:00.000-07:002012-10-04T23:18:23.638-07:00REDUCED TO BEGGARY BY MUMBAI: THE METROPOLIS AND THE AVANT-GARDE MARATHI POETRY. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
( From 'Critical Perspectives' ed. Anil Kapoor, Jaipur: Mark Publishers, 2012, ISBN 978-81-89472-95-5, pp. 59-69)</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span lang="EN-IN">Reduced to beggary by Mumbai<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span lang="EN-IN">Ate a piece of jaggery at Kalyan<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span lang="EN-IN">In a village that had no name<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span lang="EN-IN">But hand a waterfall<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span lang="EN-IN">Sold one blanket<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span lang="EN-IN">And had a fill of water<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span lang="EN-IN">Chewing peepul leaves<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span lang="EN-IN">Came up to Nashik<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span lang="EN-IN">Sold Tukaram there <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span lang="EN-IN">And ate kheema-pav on top <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span lang="EN-IN">While leaving Agra Road<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<i><span lang="EN-IN">Broke a
chappal<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">( Arun
Kolatkar, trans. Dilip Chitre)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">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 <i>Kosla</i>, shows clear
impact of JD Salinger’s <i>The Catcher in
the Rye</i>, 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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">Monroe K
Spears’s book <i>Dionysus and the City </i>(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</span><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">‘ 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)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">Spears in his
discerning examination point out that the word City etymologically comes from
the <i>civitas</i>, city-state, which is properly an aggregation of <i>cives</i>,
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, <i>Civitas
Terrena</i> or the Earthly City was seen as striving towards a Heavenly City, <i>Civitas
Dei</i>, but for moderns, says Prof Spears, it is seen as falling or fallen and
moving towards the Infernal City the City of <i>Dis</i>, 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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">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 <i>The
Country and the City</i> (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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">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)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%;">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’<i>. </i>The
first line obviously is a take on the Kolatkar poem quoted in the beginning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Marathi pauperized
me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">So I fingered
English shit<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">My ass aches<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">From paying for<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">All escape routes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> A white Mercedes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Smashes me to
smithereens <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">I know by heart<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">The success
stories chart<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">In the personality
development class-<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">-My worshiped
location<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Ad copies of MNCs<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Hold me under
their sway <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">I prognosticate <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Oriental
revelation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Of virtual reality<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">In so-called alien
intelligence<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">The world is not
mean<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">But we are jerks<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%;">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’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">An <i>Announcement</i> for Mr. & Mrs. Limaye<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">i)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Mrs. <i>Limaye aap jahan<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Kahibhi ho forein<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Mulund station par chale aaiye<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Wahan aapke pati<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Aapka intezaar kar rahe hai<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">ii)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Maalik</span></i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> who is <i>sabka ek<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Bang everyone<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">O Shirdi king Sai Baba bang bang<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">iii)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">People lose their way<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">People lose each other<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">People make civil statements<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">On a <i>superbuiltup</i> world<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">iv)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In a public <i>local</i> train<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">There is an unimagined itchiness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">On your private emotions<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">You mentally advertise it to yourself<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">v)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Mr. & Mrs. Limaye<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Hiding behind <i>popular</i> philosophies<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Wait for<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Each other<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Facing each other.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Vrajesh Solanki uses a
similar post modernist device of pastiche and collage in one of this poems
entitled ‘ Poems of Advertisements’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">About films: wanted boys and girls for a new TV
serial,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Smart, young, having a good command over language,
contact us<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">With your photo for the screen test. Earn! Earn! Earn!
Ten thousand a month.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> A golden
opportunity for the unemployed. Education no bar. A company<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> With American
base wants sales boys and sales girls for door-to-door marketing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Meet with your bio-data. <i>Vasai</i>: the second <i>Konkan</i>.
Green heaven restaurant <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Just five minutes from the station. Recognized by
Sidco. Twenty-four water supply.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">With ultra modern amenities. Loan facility available.
Booking open. Are you depressed?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Take two pills of super deluxe before sleep and
experience the power and strength<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Which you once had. Internet marriage:
www.marathilagna.com 45/55 Maratha caste<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Fill up online forms. Regarding the change of names:
I, <i>vithya dagdo gaitonde</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> From today
onwards will be called <i>vikas dagdo gaitonde</i> as per<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Maharastra gazette no. xxxx dated xx/xx/xx. <i>Sanju</i>,
please come back <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">From wherever you are, your mummy and papa are waiting
for you. Entire Patil family.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Solve the crossword no.514 please don’t send it to our
office address or try to contact<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Our office regarding the same.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%;">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:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">I now live in an
e-world<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">breathing e-air<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">whose naturalness
I no longer trust.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">When I take air in<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">and throw it out,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">I hardly realize<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">when it becomes
breath,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Likewise, when I
trickle from space<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">into cyber space<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">along with the
sound of the cursor<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">and try to reach
the given address<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">I don't find you
there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">One more
relationship is dragged away<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">into the junk
mail.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">I am Whisper Sanitary Napkin<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Lying on the first rack<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">And I am dreaming of living very close to a young girl<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Absorbing her juices.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Or that I am a Huggies Nappy Pad on the second rack<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">And I am accumulating the excreta as I snuggle<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">some infant<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Who I look after tenderly<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">For five to six hours.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Or I am a high-priced toilet soap<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Camay, Yardley or Lux International<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Or I am the television<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">And the entire family is sitting in front of me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Eating and surfing my channels<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Or that they have switched me off<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">And have left me alone in this room<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Or that I am a foot wipe<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Costing twelve bucks<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Given free with a purchase<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Of upholstery<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Good looking<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Yet my master coming out of the bathroom<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Is wiping his wet feet on me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Or that I am a broom<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">With which the folks<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Are causally cleaning their floor<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Or dusting away cobwebs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">My mistress drops me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">While using me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">And dreams of a vacuum cleaner.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">She spits on me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Even if I touch her husband's body<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">By mistake.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%;">References<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Arun Kolatkar. <i>The Boatride.</i> Mumbai, Clearing House,
2010<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">___________. <i>Kala
Ghoda Poems</i>. Mumbai, Clearing House, 2009<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">David Lodge and
Nigel Wood. Eds. <i>Modern Criticism and
Theory: A Reader</i>, New Delhi: Pearson Education (Singapore) Pvt Ltd., 2005<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Dennis Walder, ed.
<i>Literature and the Modern World: Critical
Essays and Documents</i>, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Dilip Chitre. <i>As Is, Where Is. Selected Poems</i>. Mumbai:
Poetrywala Publications, 2007<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">__________ <i>Shesha. Selected Marathi Poems</i>. Mumbai:
Poetrywala Publications, 2008<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">___________ ed. <i>An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1945-65).</i>
Mumbai: Nirmala Sadananda Publications, 1967<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">EV Ramakrishnan. <i>Making It New: Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi
and Hindi Poetry’</i>, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1995<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Fredric Jameson. ‘
Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in Leitch ed. 2001, pp1960-1974<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">______________. ,’ The Politics of
Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate’ in Lodge and Wood ed. 2005, pp.367-377</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Harold Rosenberg. <i>Tradition of the New</i>, New York: Horizon
Press, 1959, p11-12<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN">Homi Bhabha. <i>Location of Culture</i>. Routledge, 1994 </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Jean-François Lyotard, <i>The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge</i>, translated by G
Bennington, B. Massumi, Manchester University Press, 1984<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Monroe K Spears. <i>Dionysus and the City: Modernism in
Twentieth Century Poetry</i>, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Peter Burger. <i>The Theory of the Avant-Garde.</i> Trans.
Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp 47-53<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Raymond Williams, ‘Modernism
and the Metropolis’ and ‘When Was Modernism’ in Dennis Walder ed. 1990, pp 164-170<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Raymond Williams. <i>The Country and the City</i>. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1973.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Richard Appignanesi, Chris Garratt , <i>Introducing
Postmodernism</i>, Icon Books, 1999<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Sachin Ketkar ed.
And trans. <i>Live Update: An Anthology
of Recent Marathi Poetry</i>, Poetrywala, Mumbai, 2004<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Sridhar Tilve, <i>Teekaharan</i>,
Shabdavel Prakashan, Kolhapur, 1999<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">UR Ananth Murthy ,
Ramchandra Sharma, DR Nagraj Eds. <i>Vibhava:
Modernism in Indian Writing</i> Bangalore: Panther Publications, 1992<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Vilas Sarang. <i>Still
Life</i>. Poetrywala, Mumbai, 2007<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">___________________ed. <i>Indian English Poetry Since 1950</i>: an Anthology, Hyderabad: Disha
Poetry, 1990<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Vincent Leitch. et al. <i>The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism</i>. New York and London:
WW Norton and Company,2001<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9000784562148733536.post-13663373132872443172012-08-26T23:00:00.000-07:002012-08-26T23:00:20.590-07:00REBUILDING BABEL: LITERARY STUDIES IN A POST-GLOBAL WORLD<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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</div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;">
<b>Sachin
Kekar<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 22.5pt;">
"Rebuilding
Babel: Literary Studies in a Post-Global world", Melus-Melow Journal Vol.
1 (August 2011): 17-28.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><b>1)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></b><!--[endif]--><b>The Tower of Babel Reloaded<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
According to
the story in Genesis (11: 1-9), an enormous tower was built at the city of
Babylon. The people decided their city thought they should have a tower so high
that it would reach the heavens. However, the Tower of Babel was not built for
the worship and praise of God. Hence the
Lord saw this as an act of hubris, and descended to destroy the tower. He
confused people’s languages and scattered them throughout the earth so that
they don’t repeat their act of vanity.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
The myth has
been interpreted in various ways. The religious interpretation sees it as act
of the Almighty to punish human vanity and ego. The philosophers like George
Steiner, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida read this narrative as the myth
about the pure original language of humanity being scattered and dispersed so
as to necessitate translation. It is seen as a myth about origin of multiple
languages. However, the most intriguing interpretation of the story of Babel is
found in the Kabalistic traditions. According to Menachem Tsioni, an Italian
Torah commentator of 15th century, the Tower was a functional flying craft,
empowered by some powerful magic or technology.
The device was originally intended for holy purposes, but was later
misused in order to gain control over the whole world.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Let us roll
these three interpretations into one and we have the Tower of Babel becoming a
metaphor, a symbol, a myth and an allegory of Globalization: of hubris, of
technology and of plurality.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><b>2)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></b><!--[endif]--><b>Some Preliminary Confessions of a
Post-Global writer<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
The phrase
‘post-global’ in the title of this essay implies that one very significant
phase of globalization which began after the collapse of the Soviet Union in
the late eighties has reached its conclusion with severe economic global
recession after two decades of tremendous changes in the life of ordinary
people as well as in the realms of larger geopolitical arena. This is the
period in which I grew up as a writer and student of literature, though I
should concede that I did my college assignments and doctoral research without
Wikipedia and Google. I should also
concede that as a writer and a research scholar, I am doing things which were
unthinkable in the early nineties. I publish my own poems and articles on the
free public spaces like the blog, or online communities or freely available
webpage. In what can be described as an
online chat poetic Jam session, I exchange poetic compositions extempore with a
poet based in Kolkata whom I have never seen in my life. I meet poets and
writers from all ages and locations on the social networking sites like Orkut
or Facebook. The idea that a published poet is the one whose works are printed
is obsolete. </div>
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This essay is
product of my personal experiences as a writer, translator, research student
and university teacher. The argument I make is that the intellectual paradigms
of literary studies I grew up with are losing their relevance in the world
outside the seminar halls and the university walls, which most of the ‘critics’
and the ‘theorists’ inhabit. The theoretical categories fabricated yesterday
exist mostly in the academic discourses, which are notorious for their
ostrich-like outlook completely out of sync with the today’s world.</div>
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When I was
pursuing my postgraduate studies in the mid-nineties, on the pavements of
Baroda, I ran into pirated editions of oddly titled book called <i>The Third
Wave </i>and<i> Powershift </i>written by Alvin Toffler. Piracy is a very much
a post-global phenomenon and its consequences are far reaching. <i>The Third
Wave</i> talks of three phases or waves of evolution of human civilization. The
first wave, Toffler (1980) asserts, began with the development of agrarianism
in human societies some ten thousand years ago. The second wave began in the
eighteenth century with the Industrial Revolution. The third wave, in Toffler's
schema, began in the post-World War II era, when technology began to outstrip
industry as the dominant cultural and economic force in society. The second
wave, ‘or smokestack civilization’, according
to Toffler ‘, is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution,
mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass
entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with
standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you
wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy." The Third Wave,
Toffler wrote, ‘ brings with it a genuinely new way of life based on
diversified, renewable energy sources; on methods of production that make most
factory assembly lines obsolete; on new, non-nuclear families; on a novel
institution that might be called the "electronic cottage"; and on
radically changed schools and corporations of the future. The emergent
civilization writes a new code of behavior for us and carries us beyond
standardization, synchronization, and centralization, beyond the concentration
of energy, money, and power.’ Probably, what we need today in India is ‘ The
Third Wave’ literary studies. And I believe that the canonical ‘ cultural
studies’ paradigm is still grounded on the ‘smokestack’-cold war paradigms. </div>
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If newer
paradigms for literary studies are to emerge, then we should focus on what
Raymond Williams called ‘ emergent’ aspects of culture (1977), rather than
focus merely on what he calls ‘ residual’ or ‘ archaic’. However, we must also
look at the theories built upon the obsessive concern with ‘ residual’ and
‘archaic’ which render these theoretical paradigms themselves as ‘residual’ and
even ‘ archaic’.</div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><b>3)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></b><!--[endif]--><b>The Residual and the Archaic Literary Approaches<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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The paradigms
for literary studies in India today are basically of two types: 1) fashionable
ones which are ‘residual’ in William’s sense and 2) unfashionable ones or the
‘archaic’. The unfashionable or the archaic one is largely a Romantic theory of
literature – by Romantic, I mean the one that became fashionable in the late
eighteenth century in Europe and America. It sees ‘literature’ as an expression
of author’s ‘genius’ and literature as a receptacle of humanistic and spiritual
values of refined and elevated culture. This paradigm is still alive and
kicking and often without having a slightest awareness of being kicked in all
sorts of places. You just have to glance at the research papers and articles
published all over the country. It often combines with the classical Sanskrit
theories. I suspect this might be so
because historical reasons. John Drew’s fascinating book ‘ India and the
Romantic Imagination’ (1998) explores the unacknowledged ‘globalization’ of
ideas from Sanskritic texts which permeated the Romantic ideologies. The distinction between the Western and the
Eastern was never simple and clear-cut, as the colonial and the post-colonial
scholars assume. I notice that one aspect of contemporary globalization is
growing irrelevance of such a distinction. The problem with this approach is
that it is not really a critical approach. Its terminology is quite vague and
its language is extremely clichéd and exhausted. This framework can no longer
offer new insights into contemporary literature. Though this paradigm resembles the formalist
approaches of the early twentieth century, and often displays a superficial
familiarity with the early twentieth century formalist approaches like New
Criticism and the Russian Formalism, it has lacks the rigour and training of
genuinely close reading of the text. We can call this approach
‘pseudo-formalism’ or ‘pseudo-Romanticism’. </div>
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The second
paradigm, to which I was exposed only as a post-graduate student in a
metropolitan university in the early nineties, is almost a mirror opposite of
the ‘traditional-unfashionable’ paradigm. It is the paradigm which has almost
‘hegemonic’ ‘elitist’ -status in the English literary academia today. Paradoxically, the most interesting thing
about this paradigm is its verbose railing against hegemony and elitism clothed
in the most incomprehensible jargon. It is as brahminical as its alter-ego the
‘ traditional-unfashionable’ paradigm. It often calls itself ‘ Cultural
Studies’, and however hard it tries to distance itself from elitist conception
of culture, it forgets that this obsession with culture itself is elitist. This approach owns its intellectual heritage
to what is known as ‘ Critical Theory’ as manufactured in the Frankfurt
School. However, this approach is very
prestigious one I believe because it has mastered the art of camouflaging its
own Brahmanism. The key terms in this ‘high browed’ theories are the terms it
seeks to combat, and it does so without much awareness that its own discourses
have the same cultural status as the terms it seeks to combat: ‘hegemony’,
‘ideology’, and ‘power’. Though these terms are so very equivocal and
polyvalent, and thanks to certain neo-Marxist (or neo-Althusserian or
neo-Gramscian) underpinnings of ‘cultural studies’, there is very little doubt
about their meaning in the minds of its promoters. The basic assumption,
canonical literature is a tool for political domination manufactured by elites
and it is a sacred duty of an academic critic to read it in a way so as to
weaken its power. Literary criticism becomes the weapon against the hegemonic
and ideological literary discourse. The cultural studies crusader, however,
prefers not to talk about the elitist, hegemonic and ideologically prejudiced
nature of their own critical discourse. In such a situation, it becomes
necessary to look at the foundations of such literary studies once again. </div>
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Consider a
term like ‘ hegemony’, which means to rule over or to dominate. In Gramscian
scheme of the things, it implies ‘spontaneous consent’ of the exploited to the
ideas of the exploiters. It comes close to one of the most popular word in the
Cold War era- ‘brainwashing’. In the Cultural studies school, which came into
prominence in the era of Cold War, ‘indirect brainwashing’ is what the cold war
was basically about in the domain of ideas. The important problem with the term
is the fundamental assumption that the exploited and the victimized are
basically naïve and gullible. To imply that the ‘masses’ are gullible and can
be easily befooled and intellectuals cannot be is a sheer sign of arrogance. </div>
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Even more
important problematic in my view is the distinction between ‘the exploiters’
and ‘ exploited’ and ‘ victimizer’ vs. ‘victimized’. The exploiter-exploited
dichotomy assumes universal and absolute positions. It fails to recognize that
an exploiter in one situation may be the exploited in another. However, in
order to continue the discourse on hegemony, the exploiter- exploited dichotomy
has to be conceived of in absolutist terms.
In any society, at any period of time, there has always been a hierarchy
or wide prevalence of certain ideas. The romanticism implicit in the wish that
there would be a society where there is no hierarchy of ideas is nothing but
sentimentalism camouflaged as a radical outlook. Probably, Foucault was one of
the sharpest opponents of this camouflaged utopianism. This Nietzscheian
Foucault is certainly not the Foucault which the Critical theory oriented
cultural studies wallahs swear by.</div>
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Another
interesting case is the use of the term ‘ ideology’ and it is usually used in
certain ‘ ideological’ ways. A noted Marxist critic Terry Eagleton (1991) notes
almost sixteen different meanings of the term ideology and Raymond Williams
(1985) notes how the significance of the term shifted through history. However,
in the midst of jargonese verbiage what is sacrificed is awareness of
historicity and polyvalences. Hence, the axiomatic assumption that ‘
literature’ is ideological becomes a vague observation of little theoretical
use. </div>
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However, this
reified and dogmatic jargon of the critical theory continues to live in the
period of industrialization and cold war where the terms like capitalism and
socialism, the lefts and the right made some sense. Today when I hold some
equity shares of a company in my <i>demat</i> account, I wonder what kind of
capitalism is this, where there is no such thing as ‘means of production’ which
I own. What I own is merely a piece of information recorded digitally, no not
even a piece of paper. What seems to emerge to be emerging is <i>knowledge
capitalism,</i> which seems to be an inverted picture of the classical Marxist
paradigm of ‘superstructure-on-base’ model. It seems that the economical
relationships seem to be based on the knowledge.</div>
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The politics
and theorization of identity in the post-global world cannot be framed around
the paradigms of the cold war era. The third wave Feminist theory is just one
instance of how a traditional rhetoric of resistance indulges in a self
contradictory registers. On the one hand it denies any admissibility of
essentialist notion of gender and on the other hand it talks about retaining
the category of woman ‘strategically’. It is ‘If woman does not exist, so we
need to invent her’ kind of discourse. </div>
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The
centrality of colonial experience which the post-colonial studies assumed to be
its fundamental premise no longer seems relevant. The politics of identity in
the post-colonial situation was usually oppositional to the colonial and
orientalist discourses. Nationalism, nativism and subaltern perspectives
usually questioned the colonial discourses of identity. If the construction of
identity is a dialectical process as Hegel proposed in his ‘ master-servant’
metaphor, then there the distinction between masters and servants has become
extremely fragile and volatile today and that
‘the other’ is not homogenous and stable
and hence identities today are extremely volatile and heterogeneous. If I consume Chinese food for
snacks and continental food for lunch and Mexican dish for dinner, the politics
of identity in a Hegelian oppositional framework becomes absurd. The boundaries
that which once separated the ‘private’ from the ‘public’ seems to have become
irrelevant with the arrival of cable television mania, mobile phones and the
internet</div>
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If Benedict Anderson’s theorization that nation
is an ‘imagined community’ made possible because of print-capitalism (1991) is
accepted, then we should be able to postulate an emergent concept of nation as
a ‘virtual community’ made possible by digital revolution in general , the
internet and social networking in particular.
This virtual nation is precisely what it is: virtual, simulated and
digital. It exists in cyberspace rather than in imagination of people. It cuts
across cultural, national and linguistic boundaries. </div>
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If literary
criticism is defined simply as a language we use to discuss literature, then
what we need today is the third language which avoids the clichéd and
predictable languages which dominate the literary studies academia in India
today and deals with the ‘emergent’ aspects of the cultures. The emergent
aspects of our culture are consequences of the process of globalization which
went berserk in the nineties and mid twenties. Hence it is necessary to think
about what globalization really is or was in order to speculate on the
possibilities of literary theoretical approaches which have contemporary
relevance. </div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><b>4)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></b><!--[endif]--><b>Globalization and Beyond<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Globalization
is a buzzword, a journalistic cliché, a term which means many things for many
people. Like most of the significant concepts in social sciences, it is
fiercely contested. <span lang="EN-IN">Held and McGrew explain that globalization ‘can
be thought of as the widening, intensifying, speeding up and growing impact of
world-wide interconnectedness’. Nayan Chandra (2002) points out that it is a
millennia old process beginning with out ancestors moving out of Africa and
moving all over the globe. He says that even though this ‘g-word’ has evoked
extreme emotional responses, it has some utility if it is understood as a
‘leitmotif’ of human history. He notes that it is a trend that has intensified
and accelerated in recent decades and come into full view with all its benefits
and destructive power. Just as climate has shaped the environment over the
millennia, the interaction among cultures and societies over tens of thousands
of years has resulted in the increasing integration of what is becoming the
global human community. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN">The critics of globalization point
out the perils and destructive aspects of this process: homogenization or
Americanization of cultures across the globe, tyrannical post-cold war politics
the <st1:sn w:st="on">US</st1:sn> bent upon making the multipolar world into
unipolar one, tyranny of multinational corporations, and so on. They see it
threatening the cultural, economic, and political freedom, identity, and
diversity. Whether good or bad, one cannot overlook the fact that this process
exists, and is transforming the society at an amazing velocity. An
unprecedented interconnectedness and interdependency encompasses the entire
globe, and this is largely due to mediation of information technology and
propelled by the engines of global corporate players. The neo capitalist
mantras of free market, liberalization, and privatization and so on form the
part of the rhetoric of globalization. </span>For some it stands for ‘liberal
free market economy’ or ‘ turbo capitalism’ which exploded globally after the end
of the Cold War. For others it means rampant Americanization of cultures. Some
see it as the Digital and Information Technology revolution and emergence of a
‘ Global Village’, an integrated planet. Many see it as multinational corporate
dictatorship which is ruining this planet. </div>
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<span lang="EN-IN">To avoid the American-centric view
of globalization which seems to imply that globalization is a unidirectional
movement, the term ‘glocalization’ was made popular by the sociologist Roland
Robertson(1997). He used this word as a rendering of a Japanese word ‘<i>dochakuka’</i>. It is actually a Japanese
marketing strategy to sell a standard product with the ‘flavour’ of a
particular market. <st1:sn w:st="on">Robertson</st1:sn> uses this word with
another purpose- to demonstrate that the <st1:sn w:st="on">US</st1:sn> does not
solely control the process of creating large scale interconnected,
interdependent world, a global village. <st1:sn w:st="on">Robertson</st1:sn>
goes on to define ‘glocalization’ as ‘ the simultaneity --- the co-presence ---
of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies’. This term is useful
particularly because it does not consider ‘local’ as a mere victim or recipient
of the process of globalization. It also emphasizes that the binarism between
‘global’ and ‘local’ is not mutually exclusive and unproblematic and both the
terms are interdependent. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN">The examples of <st1:sn w:st="on">McDonalds</st1:sn>’s
Restaurants, a global player appealing to local palates and <st1:sn w:st="on">Hollywood</st1:sn>
movies dubbed into Tamil and Hindi obviously comes to our mind as the examples
of glocalization. Easy availability of Chinese <i>bhel </i>or a Jain burger in a nearby ‘gobblers’ street’ is not a
radically new cultural phenomenon. Cultures have never existed in vacuum and
instances of large-scale import-export of cultural items can be cited easily.
The notion of a ‘pure original’ indigenous culture is a recent myth and this
notion itself has circulated in an economy of cultures which is transnational.
Various versions of nativism and nationalism have become influential only due
to the context of history of colonialization. One must realize that the things,
which seem natural to a culture (like trousers and shirts), have only been
naturalized beyond recognition by the forces of history. Not many among us are
aware that the potato came from <st1:sn w:st="on">Peru</st1:sn>, coffee from <st1:sn w:st="on">Brazil</st1:sn> and chilli pepper from <st1:sn w:st="on">Mexico</st1:sn>.
That our <i>bhashas</i> or the regional
Indian languages contain words from Persian, Arabic, adjacent languages, tribal
languages and of course English, is overlooked by the politicians of various
forms of nativisms and nationalisms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN">Poetics, a complex cultural
artefact, has been increasingly ‘glocalized’ in twentieth century. Poetics is a
component of ideology that defines both poetry and its social and cultural
function in a given society. The globally influential European literary movements
like Romanticism and Modernism were themselves influenced by literatures of the
East. The Romantic Movement, which travelled from European cultural centres to <st1:sn w:st="on">America</st1:sn> and rest of the world, bore influence of the
Orientalist translations of the eastern literary and philosophical texts. That
the high modernist poets like Pound, <st1:sn w:st="on">Eliot</st1:sn>, and <st1:sn w:st="on">Yeats</st1:sn> was keenly interested in the Eastern literatures is
well known. The major literary languages across the globe translated,
glocalized, and assimilated the poetics of European movements into their own
literary systems. The study of glocalization, translation, assimilation, and
globalization of poetics would fall under comparative literary studies. One of
the major functions for comparative literature in the era of globalization
would be to study the interaction between the global and local literary systems
in their political, historical, and social context.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN">In the colonial period, the British
literary forms like the novel, journalistic prose, short story and so on
moulded similar genres and forms in many Indian languages. The Romantic poetry
and the Victorian poetry were extremely popular and influential in Marathi in
the first three to four decades of the twentieth century. Chiefly poetics,
apart from some literary texts, was translated, glocalized in the regional
languages. This of course is not to overlook the context of power and
asymmetrical relation between cultures in this process of glocalization. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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In spite of
sharp differences and controversies, William Scheuerman (2008) in his entry on
Globalization in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, points out the
aspects of globalization on which there is some consensus. Most contemporary social theorists endorse the
view that globalization refers to fundamental changes in the spatial and
temporal contours of social existence, according to which the significance of
space or territory undergoes shifts in the face of a no less dramatic
acceleration in the temporal structure of crucial forms of human activity.
Geographical distance is typically measured in time. As the time necessary to
connect distinct geographical locations is reduced, distance or space undergoes
compression or “annihilation.” The human experience of space is intimately
connected to the temporal structure of those activities by means of which we
experience space. Changes in the temporality of human activity inevitably
generate altered experiences of space or territory.</div>
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Scheuerman
notes that in spite of great differences among experts on the opinion about the
causes of globalization, there is an agreement on five essential
characteristics of globalization. The five characteristics of globalization
according to Scheuerman are:</div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]-->1)<span style="font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span><!--[endif]-->Globalization is linked to deterritorialization</div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]-->2)<span style="font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span><!--[endif]-->Globalization is linked to the growth of social
interconnectedness across existing geographical and political boundaries. </div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]-->3)<span style="font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span><!--[endif]-->Globalization is linked to explosion of the speed or velocity of social activity</div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]-->4)<span style="font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span><!--[endif]-->Globalization is a relatively long term process</div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]-->5)<span style="font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span><!--[endif]-->Globalization should be understood as a
multi-pronged process, since deterritorialization, social interconnectedness,
and acceleration manifest themselves in many different (economic, political,
and cultural) arenas of social activity.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The first
feature deals with the disappearance of geographical distances owing to
explosion in digital technology, the internet and the like, giving rise to
newer forms of ‘non-territorial’ social activity. The second feature is about
the world emerging as a complex ‘network’ where diverse parts are
interdependent and linked to each other in a dynamic way. The third feature is
connected to the temporal dimension of our social life whose speed has
increased in a mind-boggling way. The fourth characteristic historicizes globalization
and sees it as a process that has a long origin. The fifth and the most
important feature is the awareness of globalization as a multi-dimensional
process, which affects human life in multiple ways. Globalization is not just
about economy or politics or culture, it is about all these things and more. It
is about emergence of dazzling new possibilities in almost every sphere of our
lives, which were unthought-of before. </div>
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Alvin and
Heidi Toffler in their book <i>Revolutionary
Wealth (</i>2006) point out how the ‘Third Wave’ is transforming the ‘deep
fundamentals’ of all our relationships, including our relationships with wealth
and power. These ‘deep fundamentals’ are i) time, ii) space and ii) knowledge.
Toffler states, never before have we been able to instantly access virtually
unlimited amounts of any kind of information for virtually zero cost. Unlike
the foundations of past wealth revolutions, the Third Wave's foundation defies
traditional economics in that knowledge is not scarce; knowledge is infinite and
exponentiates itself. An economy based on knowledge also defies classical
economics due to the non-rival property of knowledge. The idea that ‘knowledge’
belongs to ‘superstructure’ in the classical Marxist conception, according to
Tofflers is inaccurate. It seems that
knowledge has started becoming the base on which economics and other things
stand. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Consequences
of globalization can vary from being extremely detrimental and catastrophic to
enriching and empowering. The utopian or dystopian vision of globalization will
always be one-sided. The black and white view of the multi-pronged and
multi-dimensional process will always be partial and limited. The opponents of
globalization are actually opposing only one aspect of globalization, and those
who are praising it are also taking a limited view of the thing. The euphoric
cheerleaders of globalization refuse to talk about the cataclysmic effect of
unchecked greed on environment or immense rise in the economic and social
inequalities in the world, while the pessimists refuse to see the immense
possibilities and opportunities opened up by digital revolution and shedding of
our antiquated dogmas and prejudices. The anti-globalization campaigners
overlook the fact that their movement is <i>also a global movement</i> and
hence very much part of globalization.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
If
globalization has altered the supposedly immutable categories, the ‘deep fundamentals’ of space and time,
the texts marked as ‘literary’ as well as language embody this transformed
consciousness. The paradigm of post-global literary has to attend to this
transformed subjectivities and languages and explain the significance and the
implications of such a transformed consciousness. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
In my view
globalization has altered what the semiotician Yurij Lotman (1984/2005) terms
as ‘semiosphere’ we inhabit. Analogy upon which the term ‘semiosphere’ is based
is that of ‘biosphere’. The ‘biosphere’ is the term from earth sciences, which
indicates the global sum of all ecosystems. Lotman postulated that ‘semantic
systems function only by being immersed in a specific semiotic continuum, which
is filled with multi-variant semiotic models situated at a range of hierarchic
levels’. Lotman opines that ‘semiotic universe may be regarded as the totality
of individual texts and isolated languages as they relate to each other…. The
semiosphere is that same semiotic space, outside of which semiosis itself
cannot exist’. Which means significance of any text, speech act or discourse is
realizable only within a particular semiosphere. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Lotman also
notes that this concept is linked to a definite semiotic homogeneity and
individuality which imply an existence of a boundary between semiosphere and
non- or extra semiotic space that surrounds it. Lotman terms this boundary,
which is analogous to mathematical notion of border which represents a
multiplicity of points, belonging simultaneously to both the internal and
external space. This semiotic border is represented according to Lotman by the
sum of ‘bilingual translatable filters’, passing through which the text
translated into another language, situated outside the given semiosphere. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Because of
globalization, I believe, the semiotic borders or boundary which preserves the
internal coherence of a semiosphere becomes all the more porous resulting in
radical transformation of the sphere in question. Consequently, the status and
significance of the texts, identified as ‘literary’ within a given semiosphere
also altered. A post-global literary theory will have to account for this
altered significance and status of texts within the context of this altered
semiosphere. The semiotic universe of today can no longer be delimited to a
territory or region nor can be separated by the conventional time zones.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><b>5)<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></b><!--[endif]--><b> The Third Wave Literary Studies: The Rise of
the Literary Machines<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
The great
explosion of personal computers in late seventies and eighties opened up new
venues for digital creativity and critical speculation. Earliest attempts to theorize the emergent
trends were in the area of electronic literature, hypertext, cybertext,
‘ergodic literature’, and the human-computer interface as in the Cyborg theory
of Donna Haraway (1991). </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
N. Katherine
Hayles in ‘Electronic Literature: What is it?’ (2007), offers definition of
electronic literature given by Electronic Literature Organization, as ‘work
with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and
contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.’ She points out
that, ‘Electronic literature, generally considered to exclude print literature
that has been digitized, is by contrast "digital born," a
first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be
read on a computer.’ She also emphasizes that the distinction between print and
digital literature is not sharp or water tight as, ‘In the contemporary era,
both print and electronic texts are deeply interpenetrated by code. Digital
technologies are now so thoroughly integrated with commercial printing
processes that print is more properly considered a particular output form of
electronic text than an entirely separate medium. Nevertheless, electronic text
remains distinct from print in that it literally cannot be accessed until it is
performed by properly executed code. The immediacy of code to the text's
performance is fundamental to understanding electronic literature, especially
to appreciating its specificity as a literary and technical production.’ She
points out the different types of electronic literatures like hypertext
literature and interactive fiction. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
The term
‘hypertext’ was coined by Ted Nelson in the sixties to indicate a special type
of database system in which objects (text, pictures, music, programs, and so
on) can be creatively linked to each other. When you select an object, you can
see all the other objects that are linked to it. You can move from one object
to another even though they might have very different forms. For example, while
reading a document about Mozart, you might click on the phrase Violin Concerto
in A Major, which could display the written score or perhaps even invoke a
recording of the concerto. Clicking on the name Mozart might cause various
illustrations of Mozart to appear on the screen. The icons that you select to
view associated objects are called Hypertext links or buttons. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Hypertext
systems are particularly useful for organizing and browsing through large
databases that consist of disparate types of information. Hypertext actually is
a way of dealing with information overload. As can be seen, the term hypertext
can be misleading due inclusion of such as graphics, animations, video and
digitized sounds. The term ‘hypermedia’ seems to be a better term for these
kinds of texts. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
The
development of electronic literature has coincided with the growth and
proliferation of hypertext development software and the emergence of electronic
networks. Two software programs specifically designed for hypertextual
literature Storyspace and Intermedia became available in the 1990's. Storyspace
v2.0, a professional level hypertext development tool, is available from
Eastgate Systems. Several important hypertexts fictions were created in the
nineties which include Michael Joyce's <i>afternoon: a story</i>, Shelley
Jackson's <i>Patchwork Girl,</i> and Stuart Moulthrop's <i>Victory Garden.</i>
Theorists like Jay David Bolter, George Landow, Stuart Moulthrop, J.Yellowlees
Douglas, Robert Coover, and Michael Joyce, among others, have made significant
contribution to the area. Jay David Bolter’s <i>Writing Space</i> (1991)
outlines a historical view of hypertext as a successor to print technology and
George Landow’s <i>Hypertext</i> (1992) views the development of hypertext from
the framework of poststructuralist theories of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida
and Giles Deleuze. Hypertext theories usually see hypertext as a postmodern
mode of communication which exemplifies theorization of the likes of Jean Baudriallard,
and JF Lyotard, in the sense that it occupies a virtual simulated space,
enmeshing with other multiple texts, and increased reader participation in the
process of producing reading experience. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
The focus of
hypertext and interactive fiction is on what is termed as ‘non-linearity’,
interactivity, changed sensory experience of the reader and heightened
participatory involvement of the reader.
In fact, theorists like Aarseth (1997) emphasize these aspects emergent
literature instead of its digitalness or electronic media. He coins terms like
‘cybertext’ and ‘ergodic literature’ to highlight this altered reading
experience. Aarseth calls for the need to evolve a new paradigm a new way of
theorizing literature based on this rather different cultural experience (1999,
31) rather than following the older paradigms
of literary theory based on poststructuralism and postmodernism like Landow and other hypertext theorists do.
Using cybernetic theories of communication, Aarseth coins the concept of
‘cybertext’ which is focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by
positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary
exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the
text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim.
The performance of their reader takes place all in his head, while the user of
cybertext also performs in an extranoematic sense.’ Aarseth emphasizes the fact
that the concept of cybertext is not limited to digital or electronic text but
also the written or printed text like <i>the I-Ching</i> which require more
than usual active participation of the reader, or texts like Nabakov‘s <i>Pale
Fire</i> or a play like <i>Night of January 16th</i> by Ayn Rand (1936),
which is about a trial where members of the audience are picked to be the jury.
The play has two endings, depending on the jury's verdict. Cybertext, according
to Aarseth is not a "new," "revolutionary" form of text,
with capabilities only made possible through the invention of the digital
computer. Neither is it a radical break with old-fashioned textuality, although
it would be easy to make it appear so. Cybertext, according to Aarseth, is a
perspective on all forms of textuality, a way to expand the scope of literary
studies to include phenomena that today are perceived as outside of, or
marginalized by, the field of literature--or even in opposition to it, for
purely extraneous reasons</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
To describe
such literary texts, digital or printed, where reader decides not only the
meaning of the text, but also the course and the outcome of the plot, Aarseth
uses a term ‘ergodic literature’. The term ‘ergodic’ according to Aarseth is
taken from physics and is derived from the Greek words <i>ergon</i>s
meaning work and <i>hodos</i> meaning the path. He says, ‘In ergodic
literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the
text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be
nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with
no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye
movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.’ The most important
element of ergodic literature is its ‘game-world’ experience. Replying to the
charges that, ‘these texts (hypertexts, adventure games, etc.) aren't essentially
different from other literary texts, because (1) all literature is to some
extent indeterminate, nonlinear, and different for every reading, (2) the
reader has to make choices in order to make sense of the text, and finally (3)
a text cannot really be nonlinear because the reader can read it only one
sequence at a time, anyway.’ Aarseth replies that these objections typically
came from persons who, while well versed in literary theory, had no firsthand
experience of the hypertexts, adventure games, or multi-user dungeons I was
talking about. He notes that the term ‘non-linear’ was one the reasons of this
confusion. In common literary theory it is used to describe narratives that
lacked or subverted a straightforward story line; for others, paradoxically,
the word could not describe Aarseth’s material, since the act of reading must
take place sequentially, word for word. Aarseth makes a crucial distinction
between the reading experience of cybertext and ergodic literature and the
reading of non-ergodic literature by using following analogies, </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
‘A reader,
however strongly engaged in the unfolding of a narrative, is powerless. Like a
spectator at a soccer game, he may speculate, conjecture, extrapolate, even
shout abuse, but he is not a player. Like a passenger on a train, he can study
and interpret the shifting landscape, he may rest his eyes wherever he pleases,
even release the emergency brake and step off, but he is not free to move the
tracks in a different direction. He cannot have the player's pleasure of
influence: "Let's see what happens when I do this." The reader's
pleasure is the pleasure of the voyeur. Safe, but impotent. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
However, on
the other hand, the reader of ergodic literature and cybertext is,</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .5in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">‘ Is not safe, and
therefore, it can be argued, she is not a reader. The cybertext puts its
would-be reader at risk: the risk of rejection. The effort and energy demanded
by the cybertext of its reader raise the stakes of interpretation to those of
intervention. Trying to know a cybertext is an investment of personal
improvisation that can result in either intimacy or failure. The tensions at
work in a cybertext, while not incompatible with those of narrative desire, are
also something more: a struggle not merely for interpretative insight but also
for narrative control: "I want this text to tell <i>my</i> story;
the story that <i>could not be</i> without me." In some cases
this is literally true. In other cases, perhaps most, the sense of individual
outcome is illusory, but nevertheless the aspect of coercion and manipulation
is real.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Aarseth
attempts rethink their concepts and the metaphoricity of terms from literary
studies and narratology. He is keen to point out that the term cybertext is
used to describe ‘a broad textual media category’. It is not in itself a
literary genre of any kind. Cybertexts share a principle of calculated
production, but beyond that there is no obvious unity of aesthetics, thematics,
literary history, or even material technology. He notes that the cybertext
reader is ‘a player, a gambler’ and the cybertext is a game-world or world-game
and ‘ It is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these
texts, not metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the
textual machinery. This is not a difference between games and literature but
rather between games and narratives. To claim that there is no difference
between games and narratives is to ignore essential qualities of both
categories.’</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
According to Aarseth, hypertext and
interactive fiction would fall under the category of digital ergodic
literature. Ergodic literature thus is a broader category of literature than
hypertext interactive fiction and parallels to postmodern poststructuralist
categories of ‘ writerly texts’. The close link between postmodernist and
poststructuralist theoretical categories and ergodic literature can be
theorized more clearly from a semiotic perspective. The very idea of distinction between verbal,
written and audio-visual texts collapses, once we use the theoretical framework
of semiotics. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
However,
Aarseth says, </div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">‘As the cyber prefix
indicates, the text is seen as a machine--not metaphorically but as <i>a
mechanical device</i> for the production and consumption of verbal signs. Just
as a film is useless without a projector and a screen, so a text must consist
of a material medium as well as a collection of words. The machine, of course,
is not complete without a third party, the (human) operator, and it is within
this triad that the text takes place. The boundaries between these three
elements are not clear but fluid and transgressive, and each part can be
defined only in terms of the other two. Furthermore, the functional
possibilities of each element combine with those of the two others to produce a
large number of actual text types.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
We can
consider the works of a radical visual artist named Eduardo Kac in the light of
above discussion. Eduardo Kac is an internationally recognized experimenter
with new media and art. Biography on his fascinating website ekac.org tells us
that Kac is, ‘A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web '80s, Eduardo
Kac (pronounced "Katz") emerged in the early '90s with his radical
works combining telerobotics and living organisms. His visionary integration of
robotics, biology and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in
the post-digital world.’ He composes what is termed as ‘holopoetry’ or poetry
conceived, made and displayed holographically, and ‘space poetry’ or poetry
conceived for, realized with, and experienced in conditions of micro or zero
gravity. In other words, Space Poetry is poetry that requires and explores
weightlessness (“micro or zero gravity”) as a writing medium. A holopoem is
holo-textual work displayed in three-dimensional space, and change according to
time and the viewer’s position in relation to the text.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Glazier
(2002) discusses Kac’s holopoem named ‘Adhuc’ as follows, ‘ Kac’s holopoem
“Adhuc” (shown from six different points of view on Kac’s page), for instance,
is “an example of the complex discontinuities that structure the syntax of ...
holopoems” (“Holopoetry: Complete”). In it, letters and words seem to drift
into the distance, superimposed on each other, eerily suspended in a spherical
mist, or atmosphere, the color of which varies from red, green, yellow, and
blue, depending on the viewer’s position. Words that are readable include
“whenever,” “ever” and “or never,” reaffirming the temporal nature of the piece
and the fact that the text is not fixed.’</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Kac’s more
recent works explore convergence between digital and the biological. In his
online essay on ‘ Biopoetry’, Kac says, ‘ Since the 1980s poetry has
effectively moved away from the printed page. From the early days of the
minitel to the personal computer as a writing and reading environment, we have
witnessed the development of new poetic languages. Video, holography,
programming and the web have further expanded the possibilities and the reach
of this new poetry. Now, in a world of clones, chimeras, and transgenic
creatures, it is time to consider new directions for poetry in vivo. Below I
propose the use of biotechnology and living organisms in poetry as a new realm
of verbal, paraverbal and nonverbal creation.’ Kac goes on to discuss twenty
kinds of biotechnological art practice of biopoetry including ‘nanopoetry’,
‘transgenic’ poetry’ and ‘atomic writing’. Transgenic poetry for instance
would, ‘ synthesize DNA according to invented codes to write words and
sentences using combinations of nucleotides. Incorporate these DNA words and
sentences into the genome of living organisms, which then pass them on to their
offspring, combining with words of other organisms. Through mutation, natural
loss and exchange of DNA material new words and sentences will emerge. Read the
transpoem back via DNA sequencing.’ Kac, his website informs us, opened a new direction for contemporary art
with his "transgenic art"--first with a groundbreaking transgenic
work entitled Genesis (1999), which included an "artist's gene" he
invented, and then with his fluorescent rabbit called Alba (2000).</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Using
language of genes to create new organism might be an excellent metaphor of how
poets actually ‘create’ new works by modifying the genetic make up of the
language, but in Kac it becomes a literal experiment to fuse biotechnology with
creativity and pull out fluorescent rabbits out of his magician’s hat. Kac’s
website tells us that Kac merges multiple media and biological processes to
create hybrids from the conventional operations of existing communications
systems. These ‘hybrids’ can be called cyborgs and science fiction of
yesteryears becomes a lived reality in contemporary times. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
One remembers
Aarseth’s observations regarding the fluid and transgressive boundaries which
separate machine, human beings and language would invariably lead to profound
questions regarding subjectivity, identity and culture. Donna Haraway’s ‘A
Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991) has offered deeply political and powerful theorization
of the very blurring of borders which separate human body and subjectivity from
machines from the perspective of the ‘third wave feminism’ or rather Gender
studies. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
The myth and
image of cyborg, in Haraway’s formulation, cannot be classified as human being
or as a living being or even as a machine. This collapse of boundaries, which
separate these categories, result in deconstruction of the western thought
based on the essentialist, originological and metaphysical systems. Haraway
notes that cyborgs are not just beings living in science fiction but, ‘by the
late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized
and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. This
cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politic’. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
The Cyborg
myth resists essentialist and totalizing discourses of the west. She points
out, ‘The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with
bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to
organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts
into a higher unity.’ She further comments, ‘ The cyborg skips the step of
original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its
illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star
wars. The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and
perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.’ The
Cyborg Manifesto declares that it is not just the god who is dead but also the
goddess and declares I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]-->6)<span style="font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal;">
</span><!--[endif]--><b>Rebuilding Babel: </b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
I believe
that the most important problem with the New Media theories of hypertext,
electronic literature, cybertext and ‘ergodic literature is their obsession
with digital media at the expense of locating the social and historical context
of globalization. The new media theory seems to overlook the complex multilevel
and plural dynamics of globalization. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
A more
comprehensive post-global paradigm for literary studies have to take following
into account the altered nature of literary text, its ergodic and hypermedia
qualities, the altered role of the reader as the producer of the text in a
radical way and the altered semiosphere and changed ‘ deep fundamentals’ of the post-global world.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
However, the
velocity at which cultural landscape of the world and breakneck speed at which
new technology is emerging making today’s technology obsolete makes it
impossible to frame an overarching ‘global’ theory of literature possible.
Probably in the Lyotardian postmodern condition, there is no need for newer ‘
metanarratives’ once the older ones have become ‘incredulous’. Probably to wish
for such a theory is outrageous. Such a desire is hubris of the builders of
Babel, which the Almighty (the Almighty, who?) dislikes and hence descends on
the theorists and scatters them and confuses their tongues.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
Suniti
Namjoshi’sBuilding <i>Babel: A Novel with
Interactive Hyperlinks</i> (1996), an obvious example of ‘ ergodic literature’
dramatizes the problem. The novel is
‘about the process of building culture in the teeth of Crone Kronos’. Namjoshi
is the post-feminist fabulist of our age. Her introduction 2 enacts an
imaginary ‘power struggle between writer and reader’ where the reader demands
to know on whose terms she should read the text and why. The fascinating exchange is typically about
ergodic nature of the texts such as Building Babel which claims to give a
different kind of power to the reader. The novel consists of characters from
fictions, myths and fairy tales. However, one the most important character is
Crone Kronus whose disciples want to build Babel. Where precisely was Babel
built? </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
“In the Gobi
or the Sahara? Or the Rajputana Desert? Where do the sands sweep to the sea?
Babel was built in your brain cells. Surely you know the memes of Babel are
colonists. They are your RAM, your instant available, accessible memory. The
ruins of Babel, the growth and degradation, the endless adaptation, the
building and rebuilding, they are on your hard disk.’ (1996: 7)</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
If the memes
of Babel are colonist then it is clear why the Lord God scattered it. But the
building seems to be, in Namjoshi’s fable, more of a Sisyphusian task of
endless adaptation, building and rebuilding.
The theories, concepts, paradigms come with an expiry date and from
their ruins one rebuilds structures. However, our predicament is that the next
date is the expiry date, today’s software is no longer compatible with
yesterdays’ operating system, and tomorrow’s applications will probably no
longer run on our present operating systems.</div>
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<b>WORK
CITED:<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Aarseth, Espen J. <i>Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</i>. John Hopkins University Press, 1997, A Sample
Chapter, URL: </span><a href="http://www.hf.uib.no/cybertext/Ergodic.html"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://www.hf.uib.no/cybertext/Ergodic.html</span></a></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
_____________’Aporia and
Epiphany in Doom and the Speaking Clock: Temporality of Ergodic Ar’ t, in Marie-Laure Ryan ed. 1999<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Anderson, Benedict. <i>Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism</i>, Verso ( Rev. Ed) , 1991<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Chanda, Nayan. ‘ Coming Together: Globalization
means reconnecting the human community’, Yale Global Website , 2002,
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Delany, Paul and George P Landow. ed<i>. Hypermedia and Literary Studies</i>. MIT
Press, 2001<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Drew, John. <i>India
and the romantic imagination</i> .Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Eagleton, Terry<i>.
Ideology: An Introduction</i> (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 1-2.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Eskelinen, Markku. ‘Cybertext Theory and Literary
Studies, A User's Manual.’ URL: </span><a href="http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr12/eskel.htm"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr12/eskel.htm</span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Glazier, Loss Pequeño. <i>Digital Poetics. The Making of E-Poetries</i> (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The
University of Alabama Press, 2002), pp. 138-139 URL : </span><a href="http://www.ekac.org/glazier.html"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://www.ekac.org/glazier.html</span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Haraway, Donna.
"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in
the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hayles, Katherine. ‘Electronic Literature: What is
it?’ January 2, 2007 URL: </span><a href="http://eliterature.org/pad/elp.html"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://eliterature.org/pad/elp.html</span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Held, David and Anthony McGrew, ‘Globalization’
Entry for Oxford Companion to Politics, URL: </span><a href="http://www.polity.co.uk/global/globocp.htm"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://www.polity.co.uk/global/globocp.htm</span></a><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">‘Hypertext’
Webopedia definition, URL: </span><a href="http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/H/hypertext.html"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/H/hypertext.html</span></a><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lotman, Yuri M. On the semiosphere. (Translated by
Wilma Clark) Sign Systems Studies, 33.1 (2005) URL: </span><a href="http://www.ut.ee/SOSE/sss/Lotman331.pdf"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://www.ut.ee/SOSE/sss/Lotman331.pdf</span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Leitch, Vincent, et al. ed. <i>The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism</i>, NY and London: WW
Norton and C., 2001<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Moulthrop, Stuart. ‘Hypertext and the Laws of Media’
in Leitch et al ed. 2001,pp 2504-2524<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Namjoshi, Suniti. <i>Building Babel.</i> North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1996. The last
hypertextual chapter is available online: URL: </span><a href="http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/babelbuildingsite.htm"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/babelbuildingsite.htm</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Robertson, Roland.
Globalization and Indigenous Culture Comments on the "Global
Triad" and "Glocalization’, http://www2.kokugakuin.ac.jp/ijcc/wp/global/15robertson.html,
1997<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed. <i>Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory</i>,
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Rheingold, H. <i>The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier</i>. London: MIT Press, 2000<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Scheuerman, William, "Globalization", The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
URL =
<http: archives="archives" entries="entries" fall2008="fall2008" globalization="globalization" plato.stanford.edu="plato.stanford.edu">.<o:p></o:p></http:></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Toffler, Alvin and Heidi Toffler. <i>Revolutionary Wealth</i>. Knopf, 2006<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Toffler, Alvin. <i>The
Third Wave</i>. Bantam Books, 1981<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Toffler, Alvin. <i>Previews
and Premises</i>. Pan Books, London and Sydney.1984<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Tolva, John. ‘The Heresy of Hypertext: Fear and
Anxiety in the Late Age of Print’ , URL: </span><a href="http://www.ascentstage.com/papers/heresy.html"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://www.ascentstage.com/papers/heresy.html</span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Trend, David. Ed. <i>Reading Digital Culture</i>. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Tsioni, Menachem, cited in the Wikipedia entry on
Tower of Babel ( used as reference in the essay) URL = < </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel/"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel/</span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Williams, Raymond. <i>Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society</i>. Revised edition. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Pp. 153-157<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">______________ <i>Marxism
and Literature</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp 121-6<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Morris, Adalaide and Thomas Swiss. Ed<i>. New
media poetics : contexts, technotexts, and theories </i>, MIT Press Book, 2006<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Kac, Eduardo. Ed. <i>Media Poetry: An International Anthology</i>. Chicago; University of
Chicago Press, 2007<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">_____________,Space Poetry, on Kac’s website
ekac.org URL: </span><a href="http://www.ekac.org/spacepoetry.html"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://www.ekac.org/spacepoetry.html</span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">_____________, Biopoetry. </span><a href="http://www.ekac.org/biopoetry.html"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://www.ekac.org/biopoetry.html</span></a><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9000784562148733536.post-2270927195299605802011-09-11T01:40:00.000-07:002011-09-11T01:40:39.408-07:00The Writer as the Reader: Meditations of Two-Face<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><u><span lang="EN-IN">The Writer as the Reader: Meditations of Two-Face<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN">Sachin Ketkar</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN">One of the deadliest enemies of Batman is Two-Face. Harvey Dent, a
District Attorney and a close friend of Batman, became Two Face after half of
his face was disfigured and he became criminally insane plotting </span><span lang="EN">crimes around the number two, such as
robbing Gotham Second National Bank at 2:00 on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_2" title="February 2"><span style="text-decoration: none;">February 2</span></a>
and so on. But then Batman is himself double faced, living a double life as
Bruce Wayne, billionaire, playboy and philanthropist <span> </span>in the daylight and Batman in the night. The Reader
too is the </span><span lang="EN-IN">Writer's</span><span lang="EN"> double, his alter-ego,an accomplice and a
collaborator in his crimes, his other, his lover and his enemy. As every
serious writer knows that the activities of reading and writing are not
mutually exclusive and separate activities and that the division between the
writer as a producer of discourses and the reader as a the consumer is not
merely superficial but commercial as well. When I write I also read and when I
read I also produce the text. Neighter can I write without learning how to
read, nor can I learn to read if nothing is writen<span> </span>and the question of which is primary<span> </span>becomes the hen and the egg question. When
the writer recognizes and identifize his image in his Mirror Stage, it is seen ‘in
the place of the Other', outside of the self. The writer imagines himself as
the Writer, separate, autonomous and self sufficient , precisely at the moment
when he realizes that his identity is dependent<span>
</span>on the other, that is, when he reads the marks he is inscribing on the
page or on the monitor. The reader is the writer's unconscious- the Other
within. The writing, <span> </span>itself becomes the
discourse of the Other. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN">The disapperance of the Writer, his death, is a
myth, and most probably a Christian myth. The writer who disappears at the time
when writing writes itself is merely reborn as the Reader. When the Reader
reads she allows the writer's consciousness to pervade her soul, she allows the
Other to intrude her self- that is she translates.<span> </span>Translation, like reading, is acknowledging
the presence of the Other as the Other: the other language, other culture,
other text, other writer, and so it is more <i>ethical</i> than many other
practices. <span> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN">Translation is both reading and writing and a
critique of the division of the distinction between reading and writing. <span> </span>Effacing this illusionary distinction, it
reveals that there can be no writing which is not based on reading and there is
no reading that is not dependent on writing. Translation reveals that text even
if it carries the signature of the writer- the father,<span> </span>also bears the signature of the reader-the
mother. It reveals that both reading and writing are founded on there respective
other. It shows that the either category of a binarism is dependent on its
opposite. The Derridian philosophy reveals that the position a text overtly
claims to take is a translation of the position it opposes and the more
polemical a text is , the more literally it translates its counter position.
These are the things that responsible for the othering and the marginalization
of translation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN">Translation is <i>both</i> reading and writing ,
reading as writing and writing as reading. It practices the diffrence which
veers towards sameness; it practices the opposites , <i>yoked</i> together, in
a mythical schizoid economy. Etymologically, the term Yoga is derived from the
Sanskrit ‘yug- joining, a mythopoetic <i>yoking</i> together of the dualities,
the Self and Other, the human consciousness and the cosmic consciousness, the
male and the female principles, the yin and yang, the Purush and Prakriti, the
day and the night, the good and the evil, the <i>krushna</i> (black) and the <i>shukla</i>
(white), and <span> </span>knowledge (vidya) and
ignorance (avidya). But then translation is also <i>bhoga</i>, the<span> </span>apparent opposite of the Yoga. But the term <i>bhoga</i>
is etymologically derived from <i>bhuja</i> which means to relish, enjoy, eat
and the word <i>bhakti</i> too is derived from the same root. Bhakti means to
enjoy, relish, eat and be one with the Other and like the Yoga is an attempt to
efface the dualities. But you cannot efface the dualities<span> </span>without recognizing their difference and the
distinction. But why is there disticntion and difference in the first place?
Narsinh Mehta has his own ideas:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10.5pt;">Only to taste the nectar of being manifold,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10.5pt;">You created the <i>jiva</i> and the <i>siva</i> and
countless other forms!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10.5pt;">In this entire universe, you alone exist, Shri Hari,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10.5pt;">Yet, in infinite forms you seem to be!</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyCQ39QFQdYms2UdJI1bTibuYJNjbZ7OIyd6KTaRkySOZl5uBcJtPSqcndx5isQpZcFMSsUYVu8PCkvVNpFjElJ9xLdbPP2NVxlWSJmYW-g7-xm55IjHEuaa5IEsnr_35Ni9bzQCrnt9U4/s1600/narsinh_mehta2.143185324_sq_thumb_m.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyCQ39QFQdYms2UdJI1bTibuYJNjbZ7OIyd6KTaRkySOZl5uBcJtPSqcndx5isQpZcFMSsUYVu8PCkvVNpFjElJ9xLdbPP2NVxlWSJmYW-g7-xm55IjHEuaa5IEsnr_35Ni9bzQCrnt9U4/s200/narsinh_mehta2.143185324_sq_thumb_m.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN">The presence of the Other is dependent on the
presence of the self and Narsinh Mehta knows this full well:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10.5pt;">Only because<i> I</i> truly exist, <i>you</i>
exist!<span> </span>Without me, you cannot be!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10.5pt;">You will exist only as long as I exist!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10.5pt;">If I no longer exist, you too will cease to be, and
become ineffable, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10.5pt;">For who will name you if I cease to be?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN">Call it whatever you like advaita, schizophrenia,
madness, poetry , samadhi, orgasm, bhakti or<span>
</span>translation,<span> </span>it really makes no
difference.<span> </span>Therefore, when I ask myself
who am I ? The writer or the reader? I can only reply: I am a translator, I am
Two-Face, yogi, bhogi, bhakta, schizophrenic, and Batman. Translate me as you
will.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<b><u><span lang="EN">Notes<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span lang="EN">Jacques Lacan, </span></b><span lang="EN">From Wikipedia, the free online encylopedia<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacan#The_mirror_stage_.28le_stade_du_miroir.29">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacan#The_mirror_stage_.28le_stade_du_miroir.29</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span lang="EN">Narsinh Mehta</span></b><span lang="EN">, translated by Sachin Ketkar,<span> </span>‘Akhil Brahmandma Ek Tu Shri Hari' and<span> </span>‘ Hun khare tu kharo, hu wina tu nahi,…..'
from Shivlal Jesalpura ed.<span> </span>Narsinh<span> </span>Mehta ni Kavya Krutiyo, Sahitya Sanshodhan
Prakashan, Ahmedabad, 1989, page 289 and 290<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span lang="EN">Two Face</span></b><span lang="EN">,</span><span lang="EN"> </span><span lang="EN">From
Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Face">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Face</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span lang="EN">Yoga, </span></b><span lang="EN">From Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia,</span><span lang="EN"> </span><span lang="EN"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
From: " <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Trans-Migrating-Words-Sachin-Ketkar/dp/363930280X">(Trans) Migrating Words: Refractions towards Indian Translation Studies'</a>, Vdm Verlag Publishers, 2010<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #656d79; font-family: Arial, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: medium; line-height: 16px;"> </span></div>
</div>
Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9000784562148733536.post-81814476814004900682011-09-09T08:26:00.000-07:002011-09-09T08:26:27.249-07:00IS THERE AN ‘INDIAN SCHOOL' OF TRANSLATION STUDIES?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
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<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Sachin Ketkar<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoTitle" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">IS THERE AN ‘INDIAN
SCHOOL' OF TRANSLATION STUDIES?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoTitle" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 200%; text-decoration: none;">New Quest No.156, Mumbai, Apr-June
2004, ISSN 0258-0381, 29-39,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Rebirth of a text in
another language is the birth in a different <i>yoni</i>- in a different
vagina, a different species.<span> </span>The
translated text is a different animal altogether.<span> </span>But the way of looking at this different
animal in relation to earlier one in addition to its place and function in the
territory it inhabits in the present birth depends greatly on frames through it
is perceived.<span> </span>This framework is usually
specific to culture, metaphysics, history, politics, and social institutions of
the linguistic community that produces or receives translation.<span> </span>One wonders then, whether there are certain
themes and concerns which recur in writings on translation in India, or more
fashionably, whether there is some sort of ‘Indian School' of Translation
Studies. As there seems to be a sudden upsurge of interest in translation in
English Studies in India, I have attempted in this paper a brief critical
survey of major theoretical positions of Indian scholars regarding translation
and tried to understand them in the context of Indian cultural history. I have
sought to discover shared areas of emphasis and differences in order to find
out whether any such school exists.<span> </span>I
have also compared major theorists writing in English and those writing in the
modern Indian languages in order to highlight the difference rather than
similarity between them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The increased interest
seems to be symptomatic of a certain dramatic shift in academic values,
concerns, and mindset associated with English Studies in India.<span> </span>This shift has been from uncritical
acceptance of literatures in dominant Western languages, their canons, as well
as their critical vocabulary, to historical and political contexts in which
they are produced, circulated and consumed.<span>
</span>There is a distinct attempt to de-colonize its outlook. The emphasis on
translation, I feel is one of the cultural strategies for the agenda of
decolonialization.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Closely allied with
English Studies establishment in India are the Indian writers writing in
English, many of them have traditionally been accomplished translators. English
Studies has been one of the chief patrons of this species of writing in India.
In the case of the earlier generation of writers like Sri Aurobindo or P.Lal,
the source language was chiefly Sanskrit and later on, in the case of modernist
bilingual poets like Dilip Chitre, A.K.Ramanujan, R. Parthashastry, and Arun
Kolatkar, the source language is primarily their first language. The focus of
these translators has been largely on medieval <i>bhakti</i> literature.<span> </span>Rabindranath Tagore's translation of Kabir
and Sri Aurobindo's translation of Vidyapati are the antecedents of these type
of translations. The bilingual poet translators deploy translation as a
strategy to de-colonize their souls by translating what is considered as ‘truly
Indian'.<span> </span>A noted poet and translator P.
Lal has made a very significant comment about this strategic function of
translation: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN"><span> </span>‘I soon realized
that an excessive absorption in the milieu and tradition of English was
divorcing me from the values that I found all round me as an experiencing
Indian, so I undertook the translation of Indian-in practice, mostly
Hindu-sacred texts, in the hope that the intimacy that only translation can
give would enable me to know better what the Indian "myth" was, how
it invigorated Indian literature, and what values one would pick up from it
that would be of use to me as an " Indian" human being and as an
Indian using a so called foreign language, English, for the purposes of writing
poetry. (Cited by St.Pierre, 1997:143-144)'. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In this light one can
understand Dilip Chitre's remark, ‘ Why I felt compelled to translate his
(Tukaram’s) poetry: as a bilingual poet, I had little choice, if any. There
were two parts of me, like two linguistic and cultural hemispheres, and, as per
theory, they were not destined to cohere..(2003:307)’ and ‘ I have been working
in a haunted workshop rattled and shaken by the spirits of other literatures
unknown to my ancestors….I have to build a bridge within myself between India
or Europe or else I become a fragmented person (2003:311-312).’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Many of these writer and
translators grapple with the issue of identity and Indianness in their works
and these themes very naturally emerge in their translation theory and
practice. AK Ramanujan, who holds a unique place as a poet, translator, and a
theorist, had announced the great ambition to translate non-native reader into
a native one as one of the main motivation behind translation. Yet he too
acknowledged that ‘ Every one's own tradition is not one' birthright; it has to
be earned, repossessed. The old bards earned it by apprenticing themselves to
the masters. One chooses and translates a part of one's past to make it present
to oneself and may be to others.'(Cited by Dharwadkar, 1999:122-123) Translation
becomes a strategy to give oneself one's roots. St. Pierre aptly observes that
such an attitude ‘ arises out of a desire to ground oneself more fully into the
Indian source culture.' (1997:143-144) Comparable to what is happening in
English Studies, its alienated by products also have desire to de-colonize
themselves.<span> </span>However, a significant point
is that of shifting notion of what is meant by ‘truly Indian'.<span> </span>In case of the older generations, Indianness
meant pan-Indian Sanskritic heritage and in case of modernists, Indianness
means pre-colonial heritage in modern Indian languages.<span> </span>Translation becomes one of the inevitable and
creative contrivances of giving oneself the sense of belonging and a
nationality. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The main theorists from
the English Studies establishment are the reputed scholars like Harish Trivedi,
G.N.Devy, Dilip Chitre, Tejaswini Niranjana, and Sujit Mukherjee. They are
concerned with colonial history and its impact on practice and reflection on
translation in India.<span> </span>They are chiefly
concerned about what is called Indian Literature in English Translation, or
Indo-English Literature. The English Studies connection of these scholars is
reflected in the theorizing and the sorts of concerns typical to this church
emerge everywhere in their thinking. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Harish Trivedi (1996) has
provided a fourfold division of Indian literature translated into English: i)
Indic and Indological works, mainly translations of the ancient and medieval
Sanskrit or Pali texts into English, ii) the translations of late ancient and
medieval works, largely to do with bhakti, for instance, A K Ramanujan's
translations or Rabindranath Tagore's translation of Kabir.<span> </span>Trivedi calls these two trends as neo-Orientalist
or post Orientalist trends, iii) fictional works depicting various aspects of
modern India realistically like the work of Tagore or Premchand.<span> </span>Trivedi remarks that this category broadly
conforms to Fredric Jameson's inadequate description of the Third World
national allegory and iv) Modernist or High modernist writers translated into
English, a category which Trivedi believes is contrary to Jameson's thesis as
it shows that internationalism/universalism cosmopolitanism can flourish in the
Third World as well (52) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In Trivedi’s first
category can be put works of brilliant Indologists and Sanskrit scholars like
Wendy Donniger O Flatthery, Barbara Stoller-Miller, or Lee Siegel who have
produced excellent translations of Sanskrit classical texts with erudite and
insightful commentaries, forewords, and appendices.<span> </span>Indian scholars like Sri Aurobindo, CC Mehta,
and P Lal who have translated from Sanskrit classics into English also can be
put under this heading.<span> </span>The list is
quite long, but shadow of Orientalism looms large over these translations and
so does desire to indulge in the ‘glories of past'.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">AK Ramanujan's
translations from South Indian saint-singers and of ancient Sangam classics,
and many other works more or less well received belong to the second category
described by Trivedi. It is unfair to label these translations as neo- or post-
Orientalist as these are by the translators who belong to the colonized
cultures and they translate into language of colonizers rather than the
colonial translator translating into their first language.<span> </span>Besides, Orientalism worked in tandem with
the colonizing project.<span> </span>Nevertheless,
the colonial history does play a crucial role in production and reception of
these types of translations as mentioned earlier. The desire to relate the East
and the West in ‘positive' manner springs from English educated Indian's
conscious or unconscious fear of alienation and of not belonging to the very
country he or she is born in.<span> </span>This
crisis may be due to historical, or (to use a more fashionable word) ‘post-colonial'
condition, but then this should definitely separate it from translations of
orientalists.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The third category as
pointed out by Trivedi, and is very well documented by Sujit Mukherjee (1994)
who gives an excellent list of various Indo-English realistic fictional works
translated into English in his appendix which depict various aspects of modern
Indian life.<span> </span>Mukherjee makes a strong
case for inclusion of these works in academic study of what is called ‘Eng.Lit.'
The fourth category, that of the Modernist and high modernist poets and writers
translated into English features in Mukherjee’s list too.<span> </span>He also provides a list of Indian dramas
translated into English.<span> </span>Mukherjee's
list is not complete, but it reveals what a great help this kind of effort
provides to scholars. Trivedi's schema is useful but the last two categories of
his four-fold framework seem to have only polemical relevance in the context of
his argument against Jameson's view. The division between the works that deal
realistically with India and the more modernist and experimental fiction is
controversial. He seems to imply that the latter type of fiction is more ‘international'
and having ‘universal/global' appeal while the former has only local, regional
or national appeal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Like Trivedi, Devy (1993)
is interested in the historical context of translation activity in India. He
divides the history of translating Indian literature into English into four
phases, namely: the colonial phase (1776-1910), the revivalist phase (1876-1950),
the nationalist phase (1902-1929), and the formalist phase (1912- ) (120).
Commenting on contribution of emergence and growth of Indian-English literature
in growth of Indian literature in English Translation, he remarks that the
creative writers writing in English have created ‘a ready language for the
translators' as they have invented modes of ‘ representing Indian turns of
speech, shades of sentiments, ways of feeling and social manners.'<span> </span>Besides, many Indian creative writers in
English, who are bilinguals, are translators.<span>
</span>This fact also contributes to development of this category (124).
However, one wonders whether growth and development of something like German
Writing in English (if there is any such thing) is necessary and important for
development of German literature in English Translation!<span style="color: black; text-shadow: auto;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Tejaswini Niranjana's
excellent book, apart from a rather unjust attack on Ramanujan, <i>Siting
Translation, History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context </i>(1995)
is concerned with complex interrelationship between colonialism,
post-structuralist philosophy, and translation. This concern for colonial past
and Western theories also characterize most of the contemporary theoretical
writing on translation in English in India.<span>
</span>One wonders why only the scholars associated with English Studies are so
seriously concerned with colonial history and Western critical theory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">" In a post-colonial
context the problematic of translation<i> </i>becomes a significant site for
raising questions of representation, power, and historicity," she
maintains," the context is one of contesting and contested stories
attempting to account for, to recount, the asymmetry and inequality of
relations between peoples, races, languages".<span> </span>In translation, the relationship between the
two languages is hardly on equal terms.<span>
</span>Niranjana draws attention to a rather overlooked fact that translation
is between languages that are hierarchically related, and that it is a mode of
representation in another culture.<span> </span>When
the relationship between the cultures and languages is that of colonizer and
colonized, "translation...produces strategies of containment.<span> </span>By employing certain modes of representing
the other-which it thereby also brings into being--translation reinforces
hegemonic versions of the colonized, helping them acquire the status of what
Edward Said calls representations or objects without history '(p.3).<span> </span>She points out in the introduction that her
concern is to probe ‘the absence, lack, or repression of an awareness of
asymmetry and historicity in several kinds of writing on translation'
(p.9).<span> </span>Her theoretical position seems to
be more relevant to translations into English and orientalist translations, but
the point she has raised about asymmetry and hierarchy very well applies to
translations between Indian languages.<span>
</span>The lack of systematic theorization about the problems raised by
translation between <i>bhashas</i> or modern Indian languages will be dealt
later in the paper. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span> </span>Harish Trivedi (1997) demonstrates how
translation of Anatole France's <i>Thais </i>by Premchand was distinctly a
political act in the sense that the very selection of a text was that of a one
which was not part of literature of colonial power and that it attempted a sort
of liberation of Indian literature from the tutelage of the imperially-inducted
master literature, English (407).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The postcolonial theory
has, indeed, provided a powerful analytical framework for translation studies.
Bassnett and Trivedi (1999) believe that the hierarchic opposition between the
original work and translation reflects the hierarchic opposition between the
European colonizer culture and the colonized culture.<span> </span>This hierarchy, they observe, is Eurocentric,
and its spread is associated with the history of colonialization, imperialism,
and proselytization (1-4). Because of these historical reasons, many radical
theories of translation have come up in the former colonies. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">G.N.Devy has formulated a
credible Indian perspective to translation theory by contrasting the ways in
which translation is perceived in India and in the West.<span> </span>Devy rightly notes that the metaphysical
status of translation determines how it is perceived in a culture.<span> </span>Contrasting Western metaphysics with that of
East, Devy states, ‘ in Western metaphysics, translation is an exile and an
exile is a metaphorical translation- a post-Babel crisis.<span> </span>The multilingual, eclectic Hindu spirit,
ensconced in the belief in the soul's perpetual transition from form to form,
may find it difficult to subscribe to the Western metaphysics of translation
(135). He points out that Western linguistics is essentially monolingual and
rules out the very possibility of interlingual synonymy.<span> </span>It also overlooks that fact that languages
are ‘open' to one another's influence in linguistic, social and historical
sense.<span> </span>Devy is of opinion that Indian
consciousness is ‘translating consciousness' and it exploits the ‘potential
openness of language systems'.<span> </span>He
believes ‘ if we take lead from Phenomenology and conceptualize a whole
community of ‘translating consciousness', it should be possible to develop a
theory of inter-lingual synonymy '(139-141). Devy is optimistic that an
acceptable theoretical perspective on translation can emerge from India because
it has ‘ a culture that accepts metamorphosis as the basic principle of
existence' and its metaphysics is not haunted by the fear of exile.<span> </span>He notes that the whole bhakti movement of
poetry in India had the ‘desire of translating the language of spirituality
from Sanskrit to the languages of people.'<span>
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Devy's call for indigenous
and native theory of translation based on local context and local social,
literary and cultural traditions is also found in Ayyapaa K Paniker's ‘The
Anxiety of Authenticity: Reflection on Literary Translation' (1996:36-45). He
points out that the fear of being unfaithful and the anxiety of being true to
the original in letter in spirit did not haunt the medieval Indian
translators.<span> </span>He notes, ‘ All through the
Middle Ages, throughout the length and breadth of India, Sanskrit classics like
the epics and puranas continued to be retold, adapted, subverted and ‘translated'
without worrying about the exactness and accuracy of formal equivalence.'(37).
He speculates that it was with beginning of attempts to translate the Bible
into Indian languages that this question of authenticity became a bugbear.<span> </span>He points out that the politics of medieval
Indian translations could perhaps be understood and interpreted in terms of the
visible absence of the anxiety of authenticity on the part of these ‘translators'.
He also notes that the absence of an exact equivalent for the modern sense of’
translation ' in medieval Indian languages probably suggests that the Indian
practice tolerated a great deal of creative deviance in retelling or adaptation
of a literary text and that the prestige of the source text did not haunt or
frighten the reader (1998).<span> </span>Paniker is
no doubt right in pointing out this fact but it should also be kept in mind
that translation is an inseparable part of <i>any</i> proselytizing
movement.<span> </span>Spread of Buddhism in the
first millenium across Asia also utilized practice of systematic and very
accurate translations which have contributed not only to spread of variety of
secular and religious Indian texts but also development of Asian languages.<span> </span>Sunitikumar Pathak (1978) furnishes an
interesting account of spread of Buddhist religion in Tibet, Mangolia, and
Siberia.<span> </span>He notes that thousands of
highly accurate renderings of Buddhist and Brahminical texts were produced
under royal patronage in Tibet and that in the ninth century AD there was a
conference to standardize techniques of translation in accordance with Tibetan
language and prosody.<span> </span>Several secular
texts like the plays of Kalidasa or famous <i>Amarkosha</i> were
translated.<span> </span>The stress was on high fidelity
to source texts and translations had to get approval from council of
editors.<span> </span>They were so accurate, says
Pathak, that scholars could reconstruct many Mahayana Buddhist texts missing in
their original languages by translating the Tibetan translation back into
Sanskrit and Prakrit.<span> </span>These translated
texts also later served the role of source texts for many other languages of
Asia. Fidelity, it seems, is not an invention of Bible translators, but seems
to be associated with the project of proselytization.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">What is interesting to
note is that search for ‘authentic' or truly native India seems to take modern
Indian English translators as well as theorists to pre-colonial, medieval
India.<span> </span>Colonial history is something of
a nightmare that one should try to forget. One notes that like the Indian
writers writing in English, the increasing interest in translation reflects the
increased awareness in English Literary Studies in India about its own
alienation from the Indian social context.<span>
</span>This sense of alienation will play a decisive role in the new directions
in English studies in India will take. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">While all this
theorization is no doubt very important, the obsession with colonial history,
western theories, and the problematic of the place of English in India is
typical of the scholars associated with English Studies. This obsession with
post-colonial theorization is often taken to dogmatic extremities in India
these days.<span> </span>These concerns reflect
certain self-awareness, which, one wonders, may be a form of repressed guilt
among the erudite scholars in English Studies regarding its political
underpinnings and history of its role in colonial times.<span> </span>This has led to the neglect of problems of
translating from one Indian language to another as mentioned earlier and
theoretical writings in Indian languages.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In contrast to the
perspectives mentioned, some of the well-known critics of the earlier
generation like RB Patankar (1969:61-72) had some profound things to say about
translation. He speculates on the possibility of translation from an aesthetic
and philosophical point of view. He says that translations of literary works
are said to be logically impossible but not empirically so. He points out the
contradiction in the arguments of the critics who deny the possibility of
translation. He says that the most fundamental assumption, which underlies in
the activity of translation, is that meaning can be separated from its verbal
expression and the critics who deny the possibility of translation are those
who believe that in a literary work the verbal expression and the meanings are
unique and cannot be separated from one another. However, Patankar says that
this later thesis will also have to deny the existence of literary criticism
and aesthetics since these disciplines are based on the assumption that meaning
of work of art can be abstracted in order to be understood and analyzed.<span> </span>Therefore, if criticism is possible,
translation too, to an extent must be possible.<span>
</span>He maintains, ‘there is no reason why the translator should feel uneasy
about this procedure (of abstraction).<span>
</span>He is in good company; for the process of abstraction which underlies
his activity also underlies the activity of all practical criticism which is
engaged in classifying, grading and rationally judging works of art' (71). This
refreshing perspective anticipates Andre Lefevere' s position by at least a
decade or two by affiliating translation to all other forms of ‘rewriting' and ‘refraction'
like criticism. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">One more domain of study
that is rather neglected by the scholars in English Studies is the theoretical
writings on translation in Indian languages. One of the oldest examples of such
writing is by a noted essayist, scholar, and translator Vishnushashtri
Chiploonkar (1850-1882) in Marathi.<span> </span>His
essay’ <i>Bhashantar' </i>appeared in <i>Nibandhmala</i>, book 1, and twelfth
issue in December 1874.<span> </span>His essay would
be of great interest to the scholars of English Studies as he too is writing
about translation from the point of view of colonialism and place of English.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In present times, writers
such as Umashankar Joshi, Harivallabh Bhayani in Gujarati, Bhalchandra Nemade
in Marathi and Bholanath Tiwari in Hindi have produced many scholarly writings,
which can be of great use to anyone studying translation theory in the Indian
context.<span> </span>Translation theory is being
gradually recognized as a significant area of study in regional languages and
greater numbers of writings on translation are appearing in these languages.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The noted Gujarati poet
and critic Umashankar Joshi has perceptively commented on use of terms like <i>bhashantar</i>
and <i>anuvad</i> for translation.<span>
</span>Contrasting the use of <i>bhashantar</i> with <i>anuvad</i>, he says
that <i>bhashantar</i> implies change of language and hence is only change of
formal properties of expression, while <i>anuvad</i> implies an attempt to
recapture the content and the voice once again.<span>
</span>He has also discussed problems of <i>samshloki</i> or verse translations
in identical stanza form.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In a very dense and
comprehensive essay, the noted Marathi novelist and critic Bhalchandra Nemade
(1987) has lamented the lack of significant development in translation studies.
(78-85). He laments the fact that even if original work is bad, it gets more
importance than an excellent translation.<span>
</span>He also indicates that while in the West, the great writers-translators
like Ezra Pound, and Dryden have theoretically discussed various aspects of
translation, great Marathi translators have stayed away from theorizing. He
comments on interdisciplinary nature of translation studies.<span> </span>His view on the notion of ‘equivalence' is
rather interesting.<span> </span>He believes that
that it is easier to find approximate equivalence in genealogically and
geographically closer languages like Marathi and Gujarati or Marathi and Kannada.
This is a commonly held view by the translators working between Indian
languages. Being a trained linguist, Nemade goes on to discuss what is termed
as ‘ problems of translation' from linguistics approach.<span> </span>Elaborating on often repeated statement that
the foundation of the modern age was laid by translators, he stresses the need
for analysis of linguistic impact of English on Marathi syntax, lexis, and
phonology along with stylistic aspects of literary Marathi using methodology of
comparative linguistics.<span> </span>He has
extensively discussed cultural and sub-cultural aspects of translation and
problems of evaluation of translation.<span>
</span>Essays like these are of great value to the student of translation
studies in India.<span> </span>In comparison to the
scholars writing in English, these scholars seem to be less concerned about
post-colonial perspective on translation or producing an ‘Indian theory' of
translation and tend to focus more on pragmatic aspects of translation.<span> </span>These essays usually tend to summarize
theoretical position of well-known Western translation theorists, as if to
introduce them to the reader of regional languages, while their counterparts
writing in English many times seems to take such things for granted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">None of these theoretical
writings, whether in English or in regional Indian languages can be called
representative of a truly ‘Indian' school of translation studies as both these
type of theorizing mainly reflect their own specific problems and concerns. If
a truly ‘Indian' school of translation studies is to emerge, it should not
limit itself to translations into English or be merely introductory or language
specific like those in regional Indian languages. It should explore the <i>relationships</i>
between the multiplicities of Indian languages. Such relationships are
historical, political, social and literary. It should also focus on the issues
like the challenges of translating from regional language to another.<span> </span>Paul St. Pierre makes the best advancement in
the direction of a really Indian school of translation studies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The essay, ‘Translation in
a Plurilingual Post-colonial context: India' by Paul St.Pierre (1997) is an
illuminating analysis into the problems of translating from one Indian language
to another and which offers some interesting insights into the complexities of
this area.<span> </span>He discusses various projects
like <i>Aadan Pradan</i> (lit. interexchange) run by National Book Trust, and
Sahitya Akademi projects for translating a major literary work from one
language into another.<span> </span>He points out
that these projects aim at ‘forging national integration through the exchange
of creative literature'.<span> </span>However, he is
more interested in the disparity and asymmetrical relation between various
languages due to political and social reasons.<span>
</span>He indicates that more translations are published in the northern and
central Indian languages than in the south Indian languages, when one considers
the ratio of the population of speakers and the number of books published by
the NBT.<span> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">These, he believes, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 22.5pt; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%;">‘ Do not simply represent what one might suspect to be an underlying
north south bias....' but this requires interpretation, if one takes into
account local contexts- availability of translators, for example, and cultural
traditions-as well as historical relations between languages and communities in
India.<span> </span>Such relations and contexts
continue to exist in Modern India and they influence cultural productions, such
as translations.<span> </span>They are as much a
result of colonial policy-the formation of a unitary states out of a plurality
of princedoms, feudatory states, etc., - as of decisions to maintain the
divisions in modern India along linguistic lines.<span> </span>Thus India is not only a state in which
linguistic divisions are maintained, but it is also a nation in which such
divisions can lead to new rivalries or continue the old ones.'(142). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 22.5pt; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">As an illustration, he
examines the case of Bengali texts translated into Orissa and evinces how far
greater number of Bengali texts in Oriya translations reflects near hegemonic
status of Bengali in Orissa.<span> </span>Indeed, the
unequal relations among Indian languages deeply affect traffic of translated
texts between the languages.<span> </span>One has
only to consider number of Gujarati books translated into Marathi or Bengali
and vice versa to realize that translation hardly takes between languages
having equal footing and there is a distinct imbalance between them.<span> </span>An interesting picture emerges when we
consider the number of books from Indian languages translated into other Indian
languages.<span> </span>Bengali and Marathi have the
least amount of translations from Indian languages (<i>Anuvadaat Tarzanchi
Bhartiya Bhashat Hanuman Udi</i>, Maharastra Times 5 April 1996). Does this
number reflect some sort of regionalist arrogance these languages have <i>vis-a-vis</i>
other literatures in Indian languages?<span>
</span>There is indeed such a thing as hierarchy among the literary languages
of India.<span> </span>Apart from this, one also
needs to ask that though there are better days coming for translations from
Indian languages into English, are there better days in store for translations
from one Indian language into another Indian language?<span> </span>Questions like these need to be examined more
thoroughly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">St. Pierre ends his essay
by underscoring the need to contextualize practice of translation in India and
says that, ‘ Translation...<span> </span>underscores
the connection of translation to power: relations between languages and between
communities are actualized and transformed through translation; translation
strategies reproduce more than mere meaning.<span>
</span>The close examination of such relations and strategies makes it possible
to elucidate the locations of powers within and between cultures in a concrete
fashion, and this should, it seems to be one the goals of translation
studies.<span> </span>' (145). It seems that a sound
theoretical framework for studying a crucial, yet neglected area of translation
studies in India has come from someone who is not an Indian. It is interesting
to consider the fact that while Western orientalist and Indian scholars following
their example the nineteenth century were giving most of their attention to
pan-Indian and privileged languages like Sanskrit, Christian missionaries were
doing a great service to the <i>bhashas.</i><span>
</span>So today, while most of the critics are focussing mainly on translation
into or from English, people like St-Pierre has produced a major statement on
problems of translation between Indian languages<i>.<span> </span></i>An extensive and intensive study on basis
of such a theoretical framework can yield excellent results.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The study of translation
practice and theory in the context of globalization is crucial significance for
a multilingual, post-colonial nation like India.<span> </span>Paul St.-Pierre (2002) and Lawrence Venuti
(1998) have made some insightful reflections on the relationship between translation
practices and the processes of globalization. St.-Pierre points out the
problems of making generalized observations regarding the relationship between
globalization and translation. As against<span>
</span>Venuti’s generalized observation that globalization results in more
capital being spent on translation into the regional languages, Paul St.-Pierre
calls attention <span> </span>to the fact of
increasing<span> </span>emphasis on translations from
Indian languages like Oriya <i>into</i> English. This is says is due to the
place of English in a multilingual, post-colonial society like India. He notes
the important contradiction in the situation like this where the processes of
globalization are threatening the local languages and cultures on the one hand
and at the same time it also valorizes<span>
</span>the regional and the local by considering it worthy of translation and
publication by important publishers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 2.25in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">One can sum up the characteristic
concerns of existing ‘Indian School ' of translation studies: colonial history,
the ambivalent place of English in multilingual Indian society, translation as
quest for identity and a quest for ‘true' ‘authentic' India, Indian literature
in English translation, search for indigenous or native theory of translation,
contrast between Western culture and metaphysics and Indian culture and
metaphysics, all these seem to be recurring concerns of the theorists
associated with English studies. These concerns as well as the growing
attention to translation are an attempt to decolonize itself. Their neglect of
theoretical writings in regional languages is typical of certain vanity and
snobbishness associated with departments of English.<span> </span>In general, historical study of translation
as a process, product and as a notion in India is hardly undertaken.<span> </span>Dr. Bholanath Tiwari (1972) has discussed the
notion and practice of translation in ancient India in some detail.<span> </span>I have in my own humble way, attempted to piece
together several writings that analyze diachronically the notion and practice
of translation and have tried to narrate briefly the story of translation in
India. (Sachin Ketkar, 2002). The translators who are practicing writers in
English also translate in order to overcome their own feeling of alienation.
The question of identity and ‘roots' lie at the base of intention behind
translations, especially English. Though what is meant by ‘truly' Indian has
changed over a period for these translators, the purpose behind the translation
activity remains the same. The writings in English as well as those in regional
languages have a limited relevance, if some sort of strong Indian school of
translation studies is to emerge. They are usually narcissistic and self-obsessed
as they deal only with the problems and issues specific to their domains. It
can emerge only after intensive and extensive study of historical, political,
social cultural and literary relationships between the plurality of Indian
languages. The essay of St. Pierre can be considered as a step in right
direction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: center;">
<b><u><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">WORKS CITED<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></u></b></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span lang="EN-IN">AK Singh ed. <u>Translation: Its theory and Practice</u>, New Delhi:
Creative Books 1996</span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span lang="EN-IN">Anuvadaat Tarzanchi Bhartiya Bhashat Hanumanudi!<span> </span>Maharastra Times, 5 April 1996.</span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span lang="EN-IN">Ayyapaa K Paniker, ‘The Anxiety of Authenticity: Reflections on
Literary translations ' in A.K.Singh (ed.) Translation Its Theory and Practice,
1996,</span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span lang="EN-IN">Ayyappa Paniker, Towards an Indian Theory of Literary Translation,
in Tutun Mukherjee ed. Translation: From Periphery to Centrestage, 1998</span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span lang="EN-IN">Bassnett and Trivedi eds. <u>Post Colonial Translation: Theory and
Practice. Post-Colonial</u>, London and NY: Routledge 1999</span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span lang="EN-IN">Bhalchandra Nemade, <u>Sahityachi Bhasha</u>, Aurangabad: Saket
Prakashan, 1987 78-85</span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span lang="EN-IN">Bholanath Tiwari, <u>Anuwad Vigyan</u>, Delhi: Shabdakar, 1972</span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span lang="EN-IN">Dilip Chitre, ‘Life on the Bridge’ Text of the Third Ajneya Memorial
Lecture delivered by Dilip Chitre under the auspicies of the South Asia
Institute at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1988, in ‘Says Tuka-1’ Selected
poems of Tukaram, Translated from the Marathi with an Introduction by Dilip
Chitre, the Sontheimer Cultural Association, Pune. 2003</span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span lang="EN-IN">GN Devy, <u>In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature</u>,
Madras: Macmillan India, 1993 </span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span lang="EN-IN">Harish Trivedi ‘ India, England, France, A (Post-) Colonial
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<span lang="EN-IN">Sujit Mukherjee, <u>Translation as Discovery and Other Essays on
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<span lang="EN-IN">Vinay Dharwadkar's AK Ramanujan's Theory and Practice of
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Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9000784562148733536.post-13344277111439472752009-10-10T04:19:00.000-07:002010-04-17T00:45:06.162-07:00Dionysus in Gandhi’s Ahmedabad<div align="center" class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN">Dionysus is not exactly a Gandhian God. He is the god of cruelty, excess, orgy and transgression. Restored to the Western pantheon in 1872 by Fredric Nietzsche, chiefly in order to blitzkrieg the dominant values of the Western Civilization, Dionysus presides as the chief deity of modernism. The Greek God whose philosophy is `excess of anything is good’ counters both the Christian ideas of moderation and self restraint as well as the bourgeois ideology of `excess of anything is bad’. Monroe K Spears’s book `<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dionysus-City-Modernism-Twentieth-Century-Poetry/dp/B000W16YCK?ie=UTF8&tag=excersblog-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Dionysus and the City</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=excersblog-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B000W16YCK" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important;" width="1" />’ (1970), whose title I have stolen for the title of this article, examines the relationship between the Nietzschean Dionysus and the context of urbanization in the development of modernism in the west says</span><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">,</span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;">` 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)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN">Professor Spears in his insightful analysis points out that the word City etymologically comes from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">civitas</i>, city-state, which is properly an aggregation of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cives</i>, 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. Professor 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, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Civitas Terrena</i> or the Earthly City was seen as striving towards a Heavenly City, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Civitas Dei</i>, but for moderns, says Prof Spears, it is seen as falling or fallen and moving towards the Infernal City the City of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dis</i>, 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. </span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> 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 ` <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Country and the City’<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=excersblog-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0195198107&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></i>(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).</o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> 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’ 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)</o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> 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 Gujarati. The meaning of the term modernism is indeed ambiguous and contested; however, I would characterize modernism as a sense of discontinuity with tradition and rebellion against established artistic and ethical norms. The earliest glimpse of modernism in Gujarati poetry can be found in Niranjan Bhagat (b.1926)’s ` Pravaal Dveep’ or The Coral Island. The poems are centred on the experience of the megapolis called Mumbai and exhibit influences of the western modernist poets like Eliot and Rilke along with Tagore. Among the famous contemporaries of Bhagat is Suresh Joshi (1921-1986). A lesser-known contemporary of Bhagat is Hasmukh Pathak (b.1930) also exhibits early modernist sensibility centred on the urban experience. In `Saherni Ghadio Ganta..’ or Keeping a count of time in the city, he uses a typical modernist metaphor:</o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">` and the evening ( with lipstick decorating her lips)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Kisses the streets and lanes;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Hundreds of mercury lamps dance to the Jazzy beats,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">And fires find their way into gutters.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">The orphaned dreams wandering and lost at midnight<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Weep for a while and turn silent.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"><span lang="EN-IN">While Mumbai has played a very significant role in formation of modernist sensibility in Gujarati and Marathi, it would extremely interesting to see how the city called ` the Manchester of the East’ Ahmedabad emerges from Gujarati modernist poetry. </span>Ahmedabad or Ahmadabad is the largest city in Gujarat and the sixth largest city in India with a population of almost 5 million. The city is also sometimes called Karnavati , an older name and as Amdavad in colloquial Gujarati . Ahmedabad is the administrative center of Ahmedabad District, and was the former capital of Gujarat State from 1960 to 1970, when Gandhinagar replaced it.</span></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><o:p> One of the most famous poems on Ahmedabad is a ghazal written by `Adil’ Mansuri (b.1936) one of the rebellious Gujarati poets who had to leave Ahmedabad, his homeland. Mansuri was associated with the avant-garde `Rhey Math’, a group of rebellious poets based in Mumbai. He is also credited with introducing modernist sensibility to Gujarati ghazal. The ghazal in question here is romantic and looks at the city he is leaving in a sentimental fashion.</o:p></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">You might never see it again<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">This city playing in the sands<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">You might never catch a glimpse of it again<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">On the plains of your memory<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Fill up its fragrance in your breath<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">You might never catch the scent of its wet earth again<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN">Ahmedabad emerges as an idyllic Eden from which Adam and Eve are driven away. The ghazal ends with romantic idealization of the motherland:</span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Let me rub the dust of my homelands to my forehead, `Adil’<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Who knows I may never see the dust in my life again.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN">However, not all are so sad to leave Ahmedabad or mind losing the so-called ` Paradise’:</span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-IN">Ahmedabad<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div><div align="center" class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN">Manilal Desai</span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Only in the eyes of the camels, you find compassion in Ahmedabad. Humans don’t have eyes at all. Walking on the hot tar roads, cataracts have covered their brains. I too live in Ahmedabad. I live in Ahmedabad too, and a translucent film has started to envelope me. The air conditioners of Niroz and Quality restaurants struggle to breathe in the Bhatiyar lane. The lane, however, casts shadows of the whores of Maninagar. The sands of Sabarmati have spread over every street of Ahmedabad, and the roads wait to be inundated with frenzied floods. It wasn’t for fishing by the river, did Gandhi build Sabarmati Ashram, nor was it for dallying with the Ahmedabadi dames coming for a bath here. He, in fact, wanted to procure an auto-rickshaw for Ahmedshah, who happens to drive a cycle-rickshaw here. But Ahmedabad can’t think of anything other than spitting on the tracks of Balwantrai Mehta’s car or banging its head against Indulal Yagnik’s cap. Yesterday, the horses of Ahmedabad neighed in the tombs of Sarkhej- tomorrow, Adam will ask, ` What have you done with the feelings I gave you?’ and I will take hold of the finger of a shoe-polish boy from Lal Darwaja who has agreed to polish shoes for a paisa, and run away from Ahmedabad. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN">Only camels are capable of compassion in Manilal’s Ahmedabad and the speaker is scared that he too will turn callous by living here. The poet flattens out the history and makes a collage out of it. Mahatma Gandhi ‘s Sabarmati Ashram for the speaker is built because Gandhiji wants to buy an auto-rickshaw for Ahmed Shah, the founder Sultan of Ahmedabad of the fifteenth century, who happens to be slogging on a cycle rickshaw here. History has reduced the glorious Islamic emperors to cycle rickshaw drivers. The resplendence of the Sultanate is reduced to poverty. Yet Ahmedabad does not care and given a chance the modernist Adam, unlike Adil’s Adam prefers to flee Ahmedabad holding the finger of a shoe polish boy from Lal Darwaja. Manilal’s Adam is more concerned about turning thick-skinned in Ahmedabad.</span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> Manilal Desai (1939-1966) belongs to the later generation of modernist Gujarati poets, which include poets like Labhshanker Thaker (b.1935), Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh (b.1937), ) Ravji Patel (1939-1968), Chandrakant Sheth (b. 1938) , Chinu Modi (b.1939) and Sitanshu Yashashchandra Mehta ( b.1941). What is most important here is the experience of metropolis and urbanization pervades their works in terms of imagery and sensibility. Sheikh, for instance, has many surreal sequences based on the cities like Delhi and Mumbai.</o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> Gandhi’s Ahmedabad is no longer the land of non-violence and peace. In a poem called ` Maru Shaher’ by Chinu Modi, we find Ahmedabad behaving in more of a Godseian way:</o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">My City<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Chinu Modi<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">You won’t find any fog here anymore<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Even if every mill is shut down<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">No heart melts here anymore<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">The city exhausted of serving Gandhi<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Violently seeks vengeance in innumerable ways<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">My city: Ahmedabad<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">They measure your shadows<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Not bodies<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">To stitch clothes;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Here you have to live like bugs<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">On borrowed breath<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Roads are of tar here<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">And sunlight black as tar<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Falls here<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">My city: Ahmedabad<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">This city is an old man<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Groaning with constipation<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">This city is all the fancy aerobics<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Of a back broken spider<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">It’s a museum of fallen stars<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">A grand crematory<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Incessantly <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Incinerating corpses<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">My city: Ahmedabad.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Tomorrow a rabbit <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Will prey on a dog<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Will reduce my honour<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">To ashes<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Who knows what sins of my past life<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Is this city avenging?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">I cant forego it even for a moment<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">And it doesn’t let me live<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">In peace even for a while<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">O Ahmedabad<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Why did you become Karnavati again?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Why don’t you become Aasapalli?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN">Ahmedabad is neither the `Manchester of the East’ nor is the land of ahimsa. The mills are closed down and like Manilal’s Ahmedabad, it gives a damn for it. The city is exhausted of serving Gandhi and seeks vengeance with incredible violence. The poem written in 2001, which compares Ahmedabad to a `grand crematory constantly burning the corpses’ is indeed sinisterly prophetic. We can feel reverberations of the Post Godhra carnage in it. Like Manilal, Chinu Modi too flattens out history in a form of collage and uses plenty of allusions to historical legends surrounding Ahmedabad. The line about a rabbit preying on a dog is the story associated with the Sultan mentioned in the Manilal’s poem who is famed to have founded the city of Ahmedabad on the Hindu city of Karnavati after he saw a rabbit chasing a dog in that place in 1411 AD . The poem ends with the speaker moaning the return of the Hindu Karnavati and asks why Ahmedabad doesn’t become Assapalli again. Assapalli was the kingdom of a tribal king by the same name, which was conquered by the King Karnadev I of Patan in the eleventh century. Chinu Modi wants the Dionysus back in the city. The primitive tribal kingdom of Assapalli stands for the Eden, which was destroyed by so-called civilized Hindus. We can fruitfully compare the longing for tribal past in Chinu Modi’s poem with Manilal’s wish to escape dangerous side effects of being an Ahmedabadi and contrast it with Adil Mansuri’s sentimental application of Ahmedabadi dust to his forehead.</span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> However, the experience of urbanization and city life is not limited to what EV Ramakrishnan (1995) in his very important study of modernism in Indian context has termed `High Modernism’ or individualistic and elitist modernism, but is also crucially present in what he calls the later avant-garde or collectivistic or subaltern modernism. The Dalit movement in Marathi was largely Mumbai based or based in the city. In Gujarati too, Dalit poetry has taken a note of the city and its discontents. One can cite a poem by Sahil Parmar, a Dalit Gujarati poet:</o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">AHMEDABAD 1974 AND 1984<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Sahil Parmar<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">The outstretched sky plays its own tune<u><o:p></o:p></u></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Scattered stars<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Flicker feebly<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Like the squeaking whistles<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Of cloth mills razed by fire<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">The horizons hazy<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Due to the suppressed sobbing<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">The moon is pulverized <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">One...two...three...ten...a dozen fragments<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Falling upon this city<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Crushing <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Millions of people<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Millions of eyes<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Millions of dreams<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Under them.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">This city is now a crematory of dreams<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Darkness like a cemetery<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Wrings this city<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Before I choke<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">I can only say<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">`That hostel mess bill was a very big event indeed!”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN">The poem, like the poem by Chinu Modi calls the city insensitive to the closing down of the mills in the seventies. Like Manilal’s poem, it accuses the city for shattering people’s dreams and lives. Like Modi’s poem, it uses the metaphor of crematory for the city. Like the other two poems, this poem too interweaves historical references into its metaphorical fabric. The last line alludes to the event of the price hike in the hostel mess bill in LD Engineering College in February 1974, which resulted in an outcry and a strike by the students. The strike snowballed into the famous Nav Nirman Movement, a mass anti-Congress agitation to remove the then Chief Minister of Gujarat Chimanbhai Patel. JP Narayan movement backed up the Nav Nirman Agitation. The poem, as the footnote says in his collection, commemorates the event. </span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> <span lang="EN-IN">We can see that the modernist Gujarati poetry articulates voices of dissent and alternative notions of Gujarati culture and identity by employing the trope of city and the poetic material drawn from urban experience. The poems by Chinu Modi, Sahil Parmar and Manilal Desai protest against the established culture by voicing their anguish caused by the urban experience of Ahmedabad. The perceptions presented in the poems are critical to the predominant ideas of `culture’. The poems are rebellious and anarchic like the presiding deity of modernism, Dionysus. Modi’s poem is more direct in its Dionysian longing to return to the primitive tribal kingdom and its anti commercial stance (They measure your shadows/ Not bodies/To stitch clothes). The poems are also full of images of morbidity, darkness and decadence. Unlike Adil’s ghazal which is `pretty’, the modernist poems about Ahmedabad are often ugly (consider Chinu Modi’s metaphor of `</span><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span><span lang="EN-IN">This city is an old man/ Groaning with constipation/ This city is/all the fancy aerobics/Of a back broken spider...). These poems interweave references to historical references like Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmed Shah, Karnavati, Assapalli and the Nav Nirman Movment with legends like the rabbit that chased a dog and dense surreal metaphors of darkness, pulverised moon and surreal humour of Ahmed Shah driving a bicycle rickshaw. The images are anarchic and subterranean.</span></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> Raymond Williams notes that ` the key cultural factor of the modernist shift is the character of the metropolis. (1990:166).’ What Prof Williams says about the Modernism in the West has implications and uses for us too. The examination of urban experience is crucial for understanding the Modernism in Indian languages. This article is a concise attempt to do so and a beginning of a more elaborate research project. It reveals that The City is a crucial trope in the modernist poetry as the cities like Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Mumbai have played a formative role in moulding of modernist sensibility in Gujarati. It briefly examined the tortuous affiliation of Indian modernism to its urban context with a specific reference to a handful of modernist Gujarati poems by poets like Adil Mansuri, Chinu Modi, Manilal Desai and Salil Parmar dealing with Ahmedabad. I sought to demonstrate how these poems intricately weave history, sociology and politics into their dense fabric to articulate multiple and often dissenting perceptions of cultural history of Ahmedabad and by extension Gujarat.</o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Notes:</span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">All translations in the article are mine. The poems of Adil Mansuri, Manilal Desai and Hasmukh Pathak are taken from ` Adhunik Gujarati Kavita’ ed. Suresh Dalal and Jaya Mehta, Mumbai: Sahitya Akademi 1989.I am grateful to my friend Piyush Thakker for procuring a copy of Chinu Modi’s poem for me. Sahil Parmar’s poem is from his collection `Mathaman’, Self published, Gandhinagar, 2004.</span></div><div align="center" class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-IN">WORKS CITED<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div align="center" class="NoSpacing" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></b></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">1.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Dennis Walder ed. Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents.<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=excersblog-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0199253013&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe> New York: Oxford University Press, 1990<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">2.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">EV Ramakrishnan, <u>Making It New: Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi Poetry’</u>, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1995<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">3.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Monroe K Spears, <u>Dionysus and the City: Modernism in Twentieth Century Poetry</u>, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">4.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Raymond Williams, Modernism and the Metropolis. In Walder ed. 1990, p.166<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">5.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">-------------------------<u>The Country and the City</u><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">,</i> New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">6.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Sahil Parmar, <u>Mathaman</u>. A collection of Gujarati poems. Self Published. Gandhinagar, 2004<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">7.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-size: 10pt;">Suresh Dalal and Jaya Mehta ed. <u>Adhunik Gujarati Kavita’</u>Mumbai: Sahitya Akademi 1989<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="NoSpacing" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">The article appeared in New Quest, Pune, June 2009</span></span></div>Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9000784562148733536.post-43407945847461079682009-07-04T10:06:00.000-07:002009-07-04T10:10:35.159-07:00SCANNING FOR TROJANS IN INDIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH: HEMANT DIVATE’S VIRUS ALERT<p class="NoSpacing"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span lang="EN-IN">Virus Alert: Poems by Hemant Divate, translated from Marathi by Dilip Chitre, Mumbai: Poetrywala, 2004, pp. 76, Rs. 100/-<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; ">Is English translation of contemporary Marathi poetry a part of Indian English Poetry? Or does translation from non-English Indian languages occupy a separate compartment? Following this rather controversial query can lead us to the cultural sites haunted with spectres of history, sociology and politics. These spectres usually remain usefully masked and only reveal themselves at uneasy moments in intensive discussion of Indian Poetry appearing in English. The unequal status of Indian Writing in English vis a vis writing in other Indian languages mirrors the asymmetrical and hegemonic status of English language in India and this discrepancy surfaces when we probe deeper into the ideological sore.</span></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> If one examines ` Virus Alert’ poems by Hemant Divate, one of the prominent contemporary Marathi poets, translated into English by Dilip Chitre in the context of these old haunting debates, it will offer us fresh insights into tortuous relation between poetry and politics.</span></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> If we are to hypothetically consider English translation from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">bhashas</i> at par with Indian Poetry in English, <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>a collection like ` Virus Alert’ is a rarity in Indian writings in English. Going by the canons of Indian English poetry, something like</o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">` Dhullu is switching the TV on and off with the remote</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">He’s telling me to switch on one channel after another</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Till his favourite channel is found</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Any moment soon after</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">He begins to hate the channel..(p.2)</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Would be considered `too loose’, ` too direct’ and less informed by the Anglo American modernist aesthetics of formal precision, irony and mythopoetic imagery. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The chances of a longish, directly confessional and often flat poetry like that of Virus Alert of being rejected by the established canons of Indian English poetry are great.</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> Yet one cannot fail to acknowledge that there<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>is something unsentimentally honest and humane in these poems which make them attractive in spite of being ` quite different’ from the `acceptable’ norms of Indian poetry in English. The themes of the poems as well as their treatment differ from the ones usually found in Indian poetry in English.</o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> Chitre in his Foreword suggests that anxiety and panic seems to be the most common themes of Virus Alert. However, it seems that the central theme of the collection seems to me is inability to come to terms with what the City like Mumbai has done to you:</o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">“ One is just a domesticated animal kept by this city</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">The one that sniffs around the city the whole day long</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Day by day </span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">One’s turning into a fuckin’</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Unprinted roll of newsprint thats found defective</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Or the key number in the material of an ad</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">A pimp, a pimp, a pimp...( p.12)</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Or consider how the poem whose title says it all ends:</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">“ and Hemant Dayanand Divate</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Belongs to no one anymore</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">He belongs to the e-universe</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">And here too he gets waylaid and screwed</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">But he hardly lets out an `e’ from his mouth</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">He utters` Aai-ee-ga!’</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">(And here too he gets screwed, p.19)</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">The metropolis of Mumbai transformed by globalization transforms the speaker, who sometimes signals his intimacy with the poet, into something he never was. It decontextualizes him, uproots him, dehumanizes him and what is left is only the memories of thirty one years.</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">The speaker is always afraid of losing his individuality, not to mention his sanity, under the cultural bulldozer of globalization:</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">I</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Am forgetting</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Me</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">No trace remains</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Of colour, form, speech, touch, or meaning</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">To me</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">There does not remain</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">God, parents, relations</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">No remainder </span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Like caste, class, religion, nationality, language, script</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Breath, mind, body and soul</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">I am reaching out</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Beyond birth and death</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">I don’t know</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Me </span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">(p.29)</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">The standardization and homogenization of culture that globalization threatens people <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>is a real danger, especially for the poets.</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span lang="EN-IN">Uniformity<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">While reading the poems of contemporary poets</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">You do not </span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">As the blind in the parable</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Of Chakradhara do</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Feel the whole elephant</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">But feel it as though it were a piller, a wall, and so forth</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">And therefore perhaps</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">If a poem</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">By one of you is</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Passed around as anyone else’s</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">It wont add a whit</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">To language.</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">(p.28)</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">The speaker is paranoid and self obsessed hypochondriac who worries about poetry being<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>bedridden in this time of great cultural crisis. </span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span lang="EN-IN">The Poem Should Not Be Bedridden<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Word constipated poem</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Its skin’s become prickly</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Its restless, itchy</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Slowly, its sores will fester</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Begin to stink as well</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Language languishing as through under a curfew</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Words silent as though prohibited from assembling</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">With this sort of strict patrolling</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">One cant even curse meanings</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">Freely</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN">(p.34)</span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> The sense of urgency, fear and the feeling of being a misfit in the culture pervades Hemant’s poetry. Unfortunately the poetry written in English is too busy trying to conform to the modernist conform to sense this cultural `emergency’ and voice the dilemma of the person trying to cross the street of contemporary Mumbai.</o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> The contemporary poetry translated from non-English Indian languages will often be loaded with concerns, which are not merely aesthetic or academic. Though both Indian Poetry in English and Indian Poetry in English translation use the same medium of English language, they exhibit distinct texture, styles and obsessions. Though the chances of poetry like that of Hemant’s remaining on the margins of the Indian poetry in English, the very accessibility of such poetry in English is bound to affect the sensibility of Indian readers of poetry in English. A point to be noted is that both these traditions can co-exist and something fruitful may emerge from mature and unprejudiced interaction among them.</o:p></span></p> <p class="NoSpacing"><span lang="EN-IN"><o:p> Hemant’s poetry will definitely appeal to younger readers of poetry in English translation for its freshness and unsentimental directness.</o:p></span></p><p class="NoSpacing">This Review Appeared in The Dhauli Review, Sept 2008</p>Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9000784562148733536.post-3403605514323106662009-07-04T09:59:00.000-07:002009-07-04T10:04:29.052-07:00Readability as Conformity: The Politics and the Commerce of English Translations from the Indian Languages<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">One of the substantive differences between a serious literary publication and a commercial one is the attitude it has towards its readers. What separates a serious literary publication from other types is whether it merely caters to its own idea of `what the readers want’ or it considers its readers as intelligent discriminating people willing to explore various alternatives. It refuses to take the reader for granted. The other essential difference lies in its attitude to the writers and their writings. Both these aspects are of course interrelated. The question is of the commercial facet of publication. The question here is regarding certain extremely prestigious publications professing serious literary concerns while they are actually interested only in their calculations of profit and loss. The issue becomes very striking in the context of publishing literary translations from Indian languages. It revives the long-familiar deliberations about politics of English in </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">India</span></span></st1:country-region></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, but in the context of `marketing’ these translations. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The editors of these prestigious English-language publications recklessly impose `stylistic modifications’ on the translations from the ‘regional languages’ of </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">India</span></span></st1:country-region></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> so as to make them more `suitable’ for their readers. Interestingly, these editors have hardly any knowledge of the source languages or the processes of translation, or even of the aesthetics of literary genres. They feel that they are making translations more `readable’. However, what one means by `readable’ or `natural’ is the question not many of these editors would like to pursue. Linguistically, whether there is such a thing as a single `natural’ English register</span></span><u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">even where English is the first language is a question that one would like to ask before asking whether there is a single universal `natural’ English register in the world. Today, when we are talking of Englishes rather than a single `English English’, asking for conforming to one subjective perception of `natural English’ is nothing more than neo-colonial arrogance. While I admit that editors have the right to proofread the text for grammatical `errors’ (a question equally vexed) or point out (not change but suggest changes) the existence of clichés and idiomatic oddities, I believe that changing the imagery, syntax, lexis, paragraph sequences, descriptive passages without any knowledge of the source text and the aesthetics of form is nothing less than the perpetuating of a tyrannical colonial mindset by the twenty-first century brown sahibs and memsahibs. I believe English is very much an Indian language but the Indians who speak English have yet to learn how to treat the other languages as equals.</span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">However, there is another side to this story as well. As every translator of Indian literature into English knows, a great many writers in Indian languages, though they may be vehemently opposed to the oppressive presence of English in India are, in fact, exceedingly eager to get their works into English. The thirst for instant fame and the desire for some sort of `international’ recognition make many of the writers submit to this editorial colonialism. After all, exploitation is a two handed game. Very few writers are willing to stand up and resist the editor’s policy of such a `back-seat’ translating. However, not every writer is so timid as to compromise with his or her art. And the case of </span></span><st1:personname st="on"><st2:givenname st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Nazir</span></span></st2:givenname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><st2:sn st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Mansuri</span></span></st2:sn></st1:personname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and </span></span><st1:personname st="on"><st2:givenname st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Mona</span></span></st2:givenname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><st2:sn st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Patrawalla</span></span></st2:sn></st1:personname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> becomes particularly significant in this context.</span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: normal; "><st1:personname st="on"><st2:givenname st="on"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Nazir</span></span></span></st2:givenname><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><st2:sn st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Mansuri</span></span></st2:sn></span></st1:personname><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and </span></span><st1:personname st="on"><st2:givenname st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Mona</span></span></st2:givenname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><st2:sn st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Patrawalla</span></span></st2:sn></st1:personname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> are two young and brilliant Gujarati fiction writers. They are marginalized in Gujarat not only because they belong to the minorities in </span></span><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Gujarat</span></span></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> but also because what they are doing is something radically new in the Gujarati literary context. Both these writers are exceptionally meticulous about their craft and aesthetics of the form of fiction. They give great importance to literary and stylistic aspects of their craft such as imagery, symbolism, paragraph sequences, and the structure of their stories. Both these writers are remarkable in their artistic use of locale, dialects, and their knowledge of subcultures. Nazir writes about a small fishermen community in Diu and </span></span><st2:givenname st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Mona</span></span></st2:givenname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> writes about the Parsis and the interior villages like Vasda in </span></span><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">South Gujarat</span></span></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">. Though their stories are mythopoetic, they are extremely realistic in their descriptive style. They write with deep knowledge about the rural areas and their stories have a very indigenous texture to them. Though both of them are influenced by some version of nativism, they are thoroughly modernist in their treatment of their themes. They are also postmodern in the sense that they are aware of the shortcomings of Indian modernism and move beyond it. Their stories reveal their aesthetic employment of myths, symbolism, and archetypes without ever losing their realistic mode. They are extremely bold in their depiction of the existential dimension of sexuality. Homosexuality, obsessive desires, and illicit relationship often come under their lenses. Both these writers use cinematography-like devices in their narrative technique. A good reader is able to identify layers and layers of mythical, historical, and existential meanings in their texts. No wonder they are marginalized in </span></span><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Gujarat</span></span></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">. Translating these writers is a great challenge even for a native speaker of Gujarati. These stories are very difficult for the urbanized Gujaratis as well as those who have no knowledge of the archetypal and symbolic modes of narrative fiction. I have managed to translate these writers merely because I was lucky to have them beside me. While translating these writers, I tried very hard to retain all the things mentioned above like technique, aesthetics, native textures, and dialects and so on in some form.</span></span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia; "><st1:personname st="on"><st2:givenname st="on"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Mona</span></span></span></st2:givenname><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><st2:sn st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Patrawala</span></span></st2:sn></span></st1:personname><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> very spiritedly rejected a very prestigious award for translated Indian fiction in English because the editors insisted on sticking to their `version of the story’ though they had absolutely no idea of the source text and they hardly understood what is meant by the aesthetics of narrative. Thanks to their own class, regional, and caste location, they wanted the story to be more `urbanized’ and `urbane’, something that these stories are definitely not. What they meant by `natural’ English was, I suspect, some metropolitan variety of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Indian </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">English, irrespective of the fact whether this idiom </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">represented</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> the source text in some form or not. They insisted on this sort of idiom because they thought their readers are </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">like them</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">: ignorant of the other interior </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Indias</span></span></st1:country-region></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and ignorant of artistic aspects of the narrative mode. </span></span><st1:personname st="on"><st2:givenname st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Mona</span></span></st2:givenname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><st2:sn st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Patrawalla</span></span></st2:sn></st1:personname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and her nominator for the award, </span></span><st1:personname st="on"><st2:givenname st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Nazir</span></span></st2:givenname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><st2:sn st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Mansuri</span></span></st2:sn></st1:personname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, threw away the award because the version they wanted to see published was not the one their editors wanted to publish---something that other Indian writers in regional languages rarely do. This experience was repeated when another smart-looking metropolitan `literary’ journal published a tampered and doctored translation of </span></span><st2:givenname st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Mona</span></span></st2:givenname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">’s story. When she and Nazir, who also had contributed his story, protested and demanded that the other stories should be published with doctoring, they received a curt reply from the memsahib saying that the magazine has rights (given to them by the ex-rulers of the British Raj, I suppose) to make `necessary stylistic modifications’ in the interest of the readers. To an extent, they may be right, for they may be thinking of their readers as belonging to the same location and ability as readers of Ms. Shobha De.</span></span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia; "><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">New Quest</span></span></span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, on the other hand, is publishing two stories, one by Mona Patrawala---the version which </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">she </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">finds acceptable, and a story by Nazir Mansuri, because it has faith in the intelligence and ability of its readers. </span></span><st1:personname st="on"><st2:givenname st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Mona</span></span></st2:givenname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><st2:sn st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Patrawalla</span></span></st2:sn></st1:personname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> has rejected the earlier draft of the same story that appeared in another magazine.</span></span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia; "><span style="line-height: 150%; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Before concluding, I would like to comment as a translator and a theorist on certain theoretical issues involved in this question. As a literary translator, I believe that my editors should have reasonably good knowledge of aesthetics, literary devices, and ideological debates and so on and if they do not know the source language and the text, they should have faith in what I am doing. </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">As a translator, I aim for approximate equivalence not at the level of word but at the level of poetics. I believe these editors are simply ignorant of such things.</span></span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span style="line-height: 150%; "><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> I also recommend two ideas for serious consideration by the editors of so-called literary publications. The first is Professor Lawrence Venuti’s radical position as propounded in </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Translator's Invisibility</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> (1995). He critically examines history, politics and economics of the norm of nativization of the translated text in order to make it appear as if it were originally written in the receptor language, to make the translator `invisible' and marginal. He examines historically how the norm of fluency prevailed over other translation strategies to shape the canon of foreign literatures in English. He makes a strong case for `foreignness' and `awkwardness' of the translated text as a positive value in the evaluation of translation.</span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span style="line-height: 150%; "><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The other idea that I would like these editors to think about comes from a great German hermenuetician </span></span><st1:personname st="on"><st2:givenname st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Friedrich</span></span></st2:givenname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><st2:sn st="on"><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Schleiermacher</span></span></span></st2:sn></st1:personname><span lang="EN-GB"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> (1768-1834). He says that there are two ways of translating: ` Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader towards the writer or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer towards the reader' and favours the first method which emphasizes the idea of drawing out the readers from the linguistic world they inhabit. I believe that the first method is radical and the other one is commercial. Though I am not suggesting that one should publish awkward and unreadable translations, I believe that if the editors do not know the source language and the text, they should have faith in what the translator is doing, however `awkward’ it is, in the interest of the source text. I am also suggesting that in a serious literary work, the things like paragraph sequences, descriptions, imagery, textures, and other artistic aspects of the source work have a very important function in the totality of the target text. If the editors do not know such things then they should stop calling themselves </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">editors </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">literary </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">publications.</span></span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span style="line-height: 150%; "><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><b><u><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">REFERENCES</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span lang="EN-GB" style="line-height: 150%; "><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Schleriermacher, F. 'from "On the Different Methods of Translating" Translated by </span></span><st1:personname st="on"><st2:givenname st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Waltraund</span></span></st2:givenname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><st2:sn st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Bartscht.</span></span></st2:sn></st1:personname><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">' in R.Schulte and J.Biguenet (eds.) 1992.pp.36 -54</span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left:.5in;text-indent:-.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Schulte, R and Biguenet. J. (eds.) </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Theories of Translation: An anthology of Essays from </span></span><st2:sn st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Dryden</span></span></st2:sn><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> to Derrida.</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Chicago</span></span></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:placetype st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">University</span></span></st1:placetype><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> of </span></span><st1:placename st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Chicago</span></span></st1:placename></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, 1992.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left:.5in;text-indent:-.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Venuti, L. </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Translator's Invisibility</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">: A history of translation. </span></span><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">London</span></span></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">New York</span></span></st1:state></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">: Routledge, 1995</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left:.5in;text-indent:-.5in"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">_______ `</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference.</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">' </span></span><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">London</span></span></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">New York</span></span></st1:state></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">: Routledge, 1998</span></span></span></span></span></o:p></p><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left:.5in;text-indent:-.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">This article appeared in New Quest , A quarterly journal of participative inquiry, Mumbai, April June 2005</span></p><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left:.5in;text-indent:-.5in"><o:p></o:p></p>Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9000784562148733536.post-41328910078243448442008-06-24T08:17:00.000-07:002010-04-17T00:57:28.410-07:00A THIRD WAY OF READING KOLATKAR: BEYOND FORMALISM AND POLITICSThe pre-modifier and the post-modifiers of the word `writing’ in the term `Indian Writing in English’ have perpetually shackled the creative writing in English in India to the relentlessly hounding questions of nationality and the politics of English language in India. Both, accusations as well as apologies sound tiresome to our ears today. Amit Chaudhari’s recent review in the Hindu of a short book called `Jejuri: Commentary and Critical Perspectives<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=excersblog-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1590171632&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>’, edited and, in part, written by Shubhangi Jayakar, stirs up the same old weary debate about nationality of Indian writing in English. While one tends to agree with his complaint ` for 20 long years, influenced by Said and post-colonial theory, the aesthetics of estrangement has been confused with the politics of representation.’ one wonders if these questions will ever stop dogging the Indian writer in English. It is high time literary studies today stopped looking at the Indian Writing in English merely from the formalistic point of view or from the postcolonial approach, which highlights the politics of nation in the text. The ancestor of this disputation is the antiquated debate about `form’ versus `content’ in aesthetics. One has to go beyond this `either/or’ approaches and search for some ecumenical critical view. <br />
<br />
It is a true that much of the recent academic criticism reads the politics of representation in literary texts. Reacting against its own earlier formalistic orientation, literary studies in the past couple of decades have obsessively focussed on the social, historical, and political context of literature. While this focus reveals that art is never `autonomous’, the formalist approach analyzes literature as a special form of language by isolating the `literariness inducing devices’ like defamiliarization. The inordinate preoccupation of the recent academic criticism with the political and historical context of art seems to promote a fallacy that these are the only contexts of art. They forget that literature is an intricate `language-game’ and has its own rules, which cannot be understood in these contexts alone. They also fail to explain why sorcerous appeal of certain works has cut across the specifics of time, region, and society. The nationalist, nativist or versions of Marxist criticism taken to their dogmatic extreme, reduce the work of art merely to its social existence and make it unidimentional. <br />
<br />
While formalist criticism will find Kolatkar<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=excersblog-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=185224853X&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe> poems teeming with literary devices of `defamiliarization’ due to his oblique idiosyncratic vision , the opposite approach, which is usually some version of socialism, will focus on the theme of alienation of an elite English educated bourgeoisie from his cultural context. Both these approaches have predetermined notions of what Kolatkar’s poetry will yield. However, I believe that a successful work of art transcending the polarities of `social existence’ and ` individual vision’. One only has to take a closer look at Kolatkar’s poems to see that they are not only, in Bruce King’s phrase `defamiliarization and transformation of the commonplace’, but are also deeply embedded in the cultural and historical milieu. <br />
<br />
Defamiliarization is not restricted to Kolatkar’s poetry only but is an indivisible part of the creative process. It is at once aesthetic and political because to perceive something, or to think in the ways that seem strange to the conventional ways of thinking, is an act of non-conformity. It may not be political in the obvious sense of conforming to some party doctrine, but simply because it dares to see something in a different way, it becomes deeply political. It is both art and politics and it is politics because it is art.<br />
<br />
Poetry of Kolatkar does not just `employ the literary devices’ of defamiliarization nor does simply deal with the theme of `alienation of the western educated intellectual’ from his roots. His texts have complex, multiple meanings and operate at more than one level. His oblique vision dislocates the established ways of perception only to yield richer insights into Indian culture. This is certainly not the `tourist’ eye-view, nor is it written with the western audience in the mind. <br />
Consider a poem from Jejuri:<br />
<br />
The Reservoir<br />
There isn’t a drop of water<br />
In the great reservoir the Peshwas built.<br />
<br />
There is nothing in it.<br />
Except a hundred years of silt.<br />
<br />
(Jejuri p.36)<br />
<br />
Perhaps nativists, nationalists, or even formalists haven’t read the poem closely at all. Kolatkar’s oblique view of the things is obviously not merely a device. To say that the great reservoir of the Peshwas, one time potentates of Maharastra has run dry and contains nothing but clay deposits of history, is not a simple use of some literary figure of speech, but a significant cultural comment on the decadence and the irrelevance of the once powerful community. This point of view is not that of a person alienated from the culture but of a person who feels that the culture has very little to offer to him. Culture is distanced from the sensitive and intelligent speaker rather than the other way round. Therefore, it is better to take all the discussion about `alienation’ in Kolatkar’s poetry with a little pinch of salt.<br />
<br />
Art is about divergent ways of seeing; poetry, about divergent ways of using language. Inseparable from the creative process, defamiliarization achieves its effects from uncovering relationships that are not obvious to others. Defamiliarization yields insights and discovers truths. It sees things from a different angle and a different level and this is what makes it semantically complex and multilayered. In epiphanic moments, the visual artist in Kolatkar sees things that startle the readers only to enlighten them. For instance, the `Pi-Dog’ in Kala Ghoda Poems, lying on a traffic island at midnight reveals<br />
<br />
“I look a bit like<br />
a seventeenth century map of Mumbai<br />
with its seven islands” (p.16)<br />
<br />
<br />
The perceived similarity between the appearance of a mongrel and an old map of the city with a history of cultural hybridization is not simply a technical device but a revelation, a discovery of truth. Discovery of these truths in Kolatkar’s poetry makes it difficult to understand it as poetry of estrangement and alienation. The defamiliarization in these poems is a road that leads to discovery and illumination, rather than being an agonized expression of an `alienated’ consciousness. <br />
<br />
On reading the poems in `<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Anthology-Marathi-Poetry-1945-65/dp/B000Q5X77C?ie=UTF8&tag=excersblog-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">An Anthology of Marathi Poetry</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=excersblog-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B000Q5X77C" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important;" width="1" /> (ed. Dilip Chitre, 1967), we notice that much of Kolatkar’s early Marathi poetry was intensely dark, unsettlingly subjective, and surreal. Many of his poems are the types which TS Eliot in his extremely perceptive essay `Three Voices of Poetry (1953) called the poems of the `first voice’. Alluding to the observations made by Gottfried Benn, Eliot observes that the poetry of first voice is addressed to no one in particular and is a result of the intense struggle between the poet and his unknown dark psychic material. Many of these poems were called `kalya kavita’ or ` dark poems’ in Marathi. Metaphysical angst, depression, and existential sense of absurdity and all the stuff found in the early modernist poetry in India are abundantly found here.<br />
<br />
In a Room Next to Death<br />
<br />
In a room next to death<br />
In a hotel in a way out town…<br />
Lizards on the wall<br />
Will cast my horoscope<br />
<br />
In the ill humoured room in the hotel<br />
Ina a way out town<br />
Witness to masturbation<br />
Will be spider in sardonic corner….<br />
<br />
(In a Room Next to Death, An Anthology of Marathi Poetry, translation Dilip Chitre, and p.127)<br />
<br />
Much of his later poetry became more and more allegorical, narrative, and mythopoetic. Eliot in his essay has pointed out that the poetry of second voice is that of the poet addressing an audience and the poetry of the third voice is when the poet attempts to create an imaginary dramatic character addressing another imaginary dramatic character. Poetry of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Kolatkar-Sarpa-Satra-Ghoda-Review/dp/B000BOSD5Y?ie=UTF8&tag=excersblog-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Sarpa Satra</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=excersblog-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B000BOSD5Y" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important;" width="1" />, Kala Ghoda Poems, Bhijki Vahi, Droan, and Chirimiri (all collections published by Clearing House or Pras Prakashan, 2003) and some of the poems from his earliest collection including Jejuri belong to these voices.<br />
<br />
Bhijki Wahi (A Soaked Notebook) is a remarkable collection of poems strung together with the archetypal motif of `The Weeping Woman’. Employing narratives, myths and legends from all over the world, Kolatkar has evoked woman’s suffering and agony. In this collection, one comes across poems on legends from Greek, Egyptian, Arabic and south Indian cultures and poems on the life of Osip Mandelstam’s wife Nadajada and on the series of painting `Weeping Woman’. <br />
<br />
The Weeping Woman III<br />
<br />
The splayed butterfly of the handkerchief<br />
Is sitting<br />
On your face<br />
<br />
Drunk<br />
On the honey<br />
Of the dark lotuses of the eyes<br />
<br />
Now how will it lift<br />
Its wings daubed with pollens<br />
Of grief<br />
<br />
It will be difficult<br />
No very difficult<br />
For it to fly in this state<br />
<br />
I don’t think<br />
The Pandavas of tear<br />
Will permit it to fly<br />
<br />
(The Weeping Woman III, Bhijki Wahi, p.287 , translation Sachin Ketkar )<br />
<br />
Woman’s tears seem to symbolize the suffering of entire humanity. Human tears transcend cultural and temporal contexts and become universal. All the contexts of human suffering, historical, cultural, or regional are incidental. The collection ends with a prayer to the Cosmic mother and evokes the redemptive power of human tears:<br />
<br />
When all this filth flows out<br />
Out of your eyes<br />
Then only a pure drop of tear<br />
Just one<br />
Will remain in the end<br />
Save it in the eye<br />
It will be the useful one<br />
To create afresh<br />
The Universe<br />
<br />
O <br />
Cosmic Mother<br />
(The Last Tear, translated by Dilip Chitre, New Quest 157-158 July Dec 2004)<br />
<br />
However, Kolatkar uses extremely contemporary language while dealing with his legends and myths. One has only to consider a poem called ` Kovalan’ based on the ancient Tamil classic `CilaPattiKarm’. After shuffling the Marathi word order of Kannagi’s line ` Ajun Kasa Parat Ala Nahi Kovalan’ (Why hasn’t Kovalan returned yet?) eight times in eight lines,<br />
<br />
`How will the poor woman know<br />
That the goldsmith whom he had approached with her anklets<br />
Accused him of theft <br />
And that police have finished him in an encounter?’<br />
<br />
( Bhijki Vahi, 197 translation Sachin Ketkar)<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
To say that Kolatkar’s poetry is not embedded in its cultural environment and politics of his location is to be ignorant of much of his work. One has to consider a very early Marathi poem like `Suicide of Rama’ from the Dilip Chitre Anthology (p.137). The poem speaks of the epic hero committing suicide by leaping out of the epic-legendary narrative into the elemental presence of the river. After <br />
<br />
`winding verses stir him up<br />
the turreted epic shrugs him off…<br />
<br />
from valmiki’s roof top rama jumps<br />
disturbing a tile or two... .’<br />
<br />
The godhead can have presence only in the epic imagination of the bard and the world of semi fictional narrative. The leap out of the world of cultural imagination into the phenomenal world symbolized by the river is the way Rama prefers to commit suicide. This `defamiliarized’ and poetic way of (mis) reading a culturally charged text create multiple layers of meanings. Playing on the binarism between cultural imagination and the phenomenal world, it obliquely asks if the whole effort of extracting a semi-fictional character out of a narrative and turning him into an unquestionable historical truth for political reasons is anything less than killing the spirit of the hero. <br />
<br />
To look at poetry, like Kolatkar’s, merely with the questions its relation to nation state or merely from a formalist angle is be extremely reductive and simplistic. Obviously, both these ways of reading are inadequate. Both these approaches overlook the individual contours and specifics of the complex artistic texts. We can discover something new and interesting if only we abandon predetermined notions of what one hopes to discover in poetry and access it with more open mind. Serious engagement with Kolatkar’s poetry will begin once we abandon these stereotypical critical approaches and start reading it more carefully, sensitively, and intelligently. Once we start doing this, Kolatkar’s poetry will gladly share its wisdom with us.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
REFERENCES<br />
<br />
Amit Chaudhari, `On Strangeness of Indian Writing’ in The Hindu (October 2, 2005)<br />
<br />
Bruce King. "Two Bilingual Experimentalists: Kolatkar and Chitre." Modern Indian Poetry in English<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=excersblog-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=019567197X&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>. Delhi: OUP, 1987, 162-82<br />
<br />
Dilip Chitre. An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1945-1965). Bombay: Nirmala Sadananda Publishers, 1967<br />
<br />
____”_____ translation of Arun Kolatkar’s ` The Last Tear’ and `Reduced to Beggary by Mumbai’ in New Quest, 157-158, July Dec 2004<br />
<br />
T S Eliot, `Three Voices of Poetry’ (1953), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Major Author Editions, ed. MH Abrams et.al (p.1986-998)Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9000784562148733536.post-82666389162447548542008-06-24T07:49:00.000-07:002010-04-17T00:51:57.805-07:00Of Pathare and Prejudice: Or Reading Contemporary Marathi PoetryThe recent article by Rangnath Pathare `The Impact of LPG (Liberalization, Privatization, Globalization) on Contemporary Marathi Literature (New Quest No. 169, July September 2007) is an excellent illustration of how literary criticism functions in Marathi today. Prejudice, dogmatic outlook and sloganeering politics have replaced intelligent analysis of literary texts and sharp sense of literary values. Posturing and sectarianism have replaced the critical ability to provide substantiating evidence to statements made by the critic. I intend to point out how Pathare’s assumptions are merely assumptions born out of his own limited understanding of literature and sociology of literature rather than penetrating original insights into contemporary Marathi literary scenario.<br />
<br />
The first severe limitation of Pathare’s observation is a rather superficial understanding of extremely complex and dynamic relationship between literature and society. Assessment of the impact of liberalization, globalization and privatization is a still matter of debate among trained sociologists and economists. Demonizing capitalism is typical of a certain leftist ideology which has failed to live up to its claims of explaining persistence of capitalism long after its soothsayers had announced its collapse. The problem with this kind of leftist politics is its own inability to account for its own internal contradictions in its ideas and actions. It views contemporary society from apocalyptic and catastrophic perspective- a view which is not very scientific or rational as it claims to be. Nor is it as saintly as it claims to be on human rights issues. Besides, a huge chunk of Pathare’s article consists of this sort of `sociological’ survey of Marathi society done by person who is neither a trained sociologist nor an economist. It consists of observations which have not been backed up any evidence of sociological data or economical statistics. Hence it is an excellent example of how not to do sociology or economics. One wonders if Prof. Pathare who is probably a professor of Physics writes articles on his subject in similar way: peppering sweeping generalizations without adequate evidence, with dogmatic sloganeering.<br />
<br />
However, more serious problems arise when such a narrow minded stance is transferred to the area of literary criticism. Its outlook is extremely reductive and deterministic. It confuses social values with literary values. Even if we accept that the dividing line between the two is often blurred, their relationship is not of simple identity. However what Prof Pathare does is even more illogical. He rails abuses on certain cosmopolitan Marathi poets like Hemant Divate, Salil Wagh, Manya Joshi, Sridhar Tilwe, and Sachin Ketkar without naming them. I wonder what prevents him from naming these new poets unequivocally. Probably he wants to be on good terms with some of them even after criticizing them. This is again very typically timid Marathi middle class attitude of criticizing someone who you want to retain as a friend. His railing is typical: <br />
<br />
They don’t recognize any authority other than themselves. Barring one or two exceptions, their reading and understanding of the Marathi literary tradition is doubtful. Based on their pseudo-witty remarks, one tends to feel that writing poetry at deeper levels is not their cup of tea.....These are self styled dons and "Mafiosi", who live in their own shallow, illusionary universe. Obviously, nobody other than themselves and their small coterie has any reasons to question their "junky" theories or their "funky" observations. They are their own self appointed critics and thinkers. They are a new post-1990 band of postmodern flag bearers, who make use of modern means of communication like blogging on the internet or websites of their own.' (New Quest: 169, July Sept 2007 pp. 19-20)<br />
<br />
I wonder who `appoints’ critics and thinkers in a given society. I would like to know from Pathare if the `post' of a writer and critic or thinker is `appointed' after an ad in newspaper, interview, `fixing' and all that. Probably that’s how he got `appointed' as a novelist and critic. With friends in high post in Sahitya Akademi and academia, Prof Pathare himself has managed to `post' himself as a `major' voice in fiction. I would also like to know if people require Pathare's under-the table-recommendation to get an `appointment' in literary scenario. <br />
I feel that people like Pathare are the ones who claim to be authorities (`They don’t accept any authority’ can be translated as they don’t accept people as Pathare as authorities) are self appointed, or are appointed by their friends in academia, official institutions and award-giving organizations. Otherwise, how come after writing mediocre stuff they manage to become `reputed' and sole bearers of Marathi traditions? If we are behaving like Mafia dons, they are behaving like military Junta and rejecting them involves rejections from their chamchas and `appointment' walahs. Actually, it is people who share Pathare’s dogmas and biases populate Marathi literary establishment, literary academia, and award-giving institutions and occupy the posts of `literary critics’. Any wonder that most ridiculous thrash from Pathare’s coterie is being celebrated as `great writing' and is given prestigious prizes. Sorry Mr Pathare, we can’t help it. We don’t recognize you or your agents, or your bosses as our authorities and neither do we need your `appointments’, `awards’ or `certificates’ for the post of writers and thinkers<br />
<br />
Besides how can you declare that someone is living in their `shallow illusionary universe’? How does one verify whether Hemant Divate’s or Manya Joshi’s universe is any shallower or profounder than Prof Pathare’s? Such a subjective and impressionistic remark itself is an indicator of Pathare’s prejudiced and naïve `critical’ (?) practice. <br />
<br />
I also wonder if there is anything wrong with the use of ` modern means of communication like blogs and the internet. However, I think that Pathare’s technophobia owns something to the emancipating power of technology. The internet and technology offers a space for expression outside the dogmatic, feudal and parochial Marathi literary culture. Technology thus becomes a liberating force. When the local puddle becomes bondage, reaching out into the global domain is refreshingly empowering, especially for those who dare to think differently and write differently. This does not of course mean that there is no digital divide or social inequality. It means that technology is a powerful tool which can be used as well as abused. It means that for a creative and independent thinking it can be used as a means of articulating oneself. <br />
<br />
Pathare has labelled these writers as Postmodern but fails to explain exactly what he means by that and what features of postmodernism does he find in their writings. The term `postmodernism’ is a weird term as Appignanesi and Garrett (1999) point out. He points out how etymologically the term is self contradictory and problematic. The term `modern’ is from root `modus’, which means `now’. Postmodern, then would mean ` after now’, which means something which has not yet arrived and will never arrive!<br />
<br />
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, like Chandrakant Patil, 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<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=excersblog-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B000NXZ65I&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>’, 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. <br />
<br />
Recently, 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. <br />
<br />
The point here is that the term, `Postmodern’ used by Pathare is used not as a historical category in literary history but as a derogatory label from a parochial point of view. 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. It is not limited to Sanjeev Khandekar or Manya Joshi.<br />
<br />
However, Pathare is not alone in Maharashtra to resist the experimental and the new. This prejudice is deeply ingrained and widely held. Another and more insidious attack on the new avant- garde in Marathi comes from Nitin Rindhe (2006). He believes that the present generation of Marathi poetry, whose cultural and social context is that of globalization is bifurcated in their attitudes on the basis of the economic class and the regional location. The poets based in metropolis belong to the class which has benefited from globalization and hence, they uphold globalization directly and indirectly. They are not critical of globalization. The poets based in non-metropolitan locations have not benefited by globalization and therefore they are critical of globalization. The conclusions he draws from his argument is that the poets and critics like Hemant Divate, Sachin Ketkar, Manya Joshi and Saleel Wagh lack sensitivity and celebrate globalization. He complains that the poets and critics who come from metropolitan location consider the poetry from non-metropolitan location `backward’ and `inferior’. Thought the argument is attractive, it is deceptive and fallacious. It is simply based on his ignorance of the poetry written by the above poets. He assumes that it is the sacred duty of poets and poetry to criticize globalization. In short, his criticism is NOT descriptive but NORMATIVE. He imposes his own ideas of the poet’s duties on the poet. No contemporary critic, Sridhar Tilve or Sachin Ketkar or Saleel Wagh has called non-metropolitan poetry as being `backward’ or `inferior’ just because the poets come from non-metropolitan location. Likewise, one only has to read some poets like Hemant Divate or Manya Joshi or Saleel Wagh carefully to realize that they are not celebrating globalization but are actually expressing their own perception of the crises created by globalization. Thus, in the face of a widespread tendency to run down the new experimental avant-garde in Marathi, I urge its detractors to read it closely first before attacking it. The close textual reading precedes close contextual reading and the critical estimate of literature can only come after careful double reading. <br />
<br />
To illustrate what I said, I will look at two poems written by Hemant Divate and Manya Joshi to verify if the said poets are actually celebrating globalization uncritically. Both the poems can be found in ` Live Update: An Anthology of Recent Marathi Poetry’ (2004). Both the poems are translated by me.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
I am Whisper Sanitary Napkin<br />
Lying on the first rack<br />
And I am dreaming of living very close to a young girl<br />
Absorbing her juices.<br />
<br />
Or that I am a Huggies Nappy Pad on the second rack<br />
And I am accumulating the excreta as I snuggle<br />
some infant<br />
Who I look after tenderly<br />
For five to six hours.<br />
<br />
Or I am a high-priced toilet soap<br />
Camay, Yardley or Lux International<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
Or I am the television<br />
And the entire family is sitting in front of me<br />
Eating and surfing my channels<br />
Or that they have switched me off<br />
And have left me alone in this room<br />
Or that I am a foot wipe<br />
Costing twelve bucks<br />
Given free with a purchase<br />
Of upholstery<br />
Good looking<br />
Yet my master coming out of the bathroom<br />
Is wiping his wet feet on me<br />
<br />
Or that I am a broom<br />
With which the folks<br />
Are causally cleaning their floor<br />
Or dusting away cobwebs.<br />
<br />
My mistress drops me<br />
While using me<br />
And dreams of a vacuum cleaner.<br />
She spits on me<br />
Even if I touch her husband's body<br />
By mistake.<br />
<br />
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. However, it goes undetected even by people who call themselves trained readers of poetry like Pathare and Rindhe, which puts a question mark over their ability to read contemporary poetry or for any poetry for that matter.<br />
<br />
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’:<br />
<br />
An Announcement for Mr. & Mrs. Limaye<br />
<br />
i)<br />
<br />
Mrs. Limaye aap jahan<br />
Kahibhi ho forein<br />
Mulund station par chale aaiye<br />
Wahan aapke pati<br />
Aapka intezaar kar rahe hai<br />
<br />
ii)<br />
<br />
Maalik who is sabka ek<br />
Bang everyone<br />
O Shirdi king Sai Baba bang bang<br />
<br />
iii)<br />
People lose their way<br />
People lose each other<br />
People make civil statements<br />
On a superbuiltup world<br />
<br />
iv)<br />
<br />
In a public local train<br />
There is an unimagined itchiness<br />
On your private emotions<br />
You mentally advertise it to yourself<br />
<br />
v)<br />
<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Limaye<br />
Hiding behind popular philosophies<br />
Wait for<br />
Each other<br />
Facing each other.<br />
<br />
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. However, the critics who attack Manya or Hemant for lack of sensitivity fail to respond to the sense of crises and suffering implicit in their poetry, primarily because they are deeply prejudiced against these poets before hand and secondarily because they simply don’t know how to read a poem. <br />
<br />
Poetry need not be sloganeering in order to be `political’. The expression of personal anguish needs only to be situated in the historical context to be realized as political. Social is nothing but the individual contextualized. However, setting off with biases and dogmas and wanting to straight-jacket certain writings even without reading them closely is a sign of substandard critical practice. Needless to say, it is fairly widespread in Maharashtra and Prof Pathare’s essay is just one example of it. <br />
<br />
References<br />
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=excersblog-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0719014506&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>, translated by G Bennington, B. Massumi, Manchester University Press, 1984<br />
<br />
Nitin Rindhe, `Aajchya Kavitetli `Navta’ ani Samikshakanchi Gochi’, Abhidhanantar,, Mumbai, April-June, 2006<br />
<br />
Richard Appignanesi, Chris Garratt , ` Introducing Postmodernism<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=excersblog-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1840468491&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>’, Icon Books, 1999<br />
<br />
Sachin Ketkar ed. And trans. ` Live Update: An Anthology of Recent Marathi Poetry’, Poetrywala, Mumbai, 2004<br />
<br />
Sridhar Tilve, Teekaharan, Shabdavel Prakashan, Kolhapur, 1999Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9000784562148733536.post-47720279106636035052008-06-24T07:47:00.001-07:002008-06-24T07:48:48.915-07:00Programmable Women A Short Story<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CADMINI%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">Pity, he had to dismantle her. He stood gloomily on the escalators watching swaying buttocks of pretty women with their customary hunks by their sides. His light blue eyes wondered if these buttocks were real or collapsible like Asha’s. The brilliant arrays of lights and colourful trendy people at Rodeo, the great interplanetary super mall, failed to uplift Angiras’s spirit. After someone hacked her, Asha started doing exactly the opposite of what he had programmed her. She used to wake up late in the morning, refuse to make coffee, and instead of playing with him in the bed, she used to turn wintry.<span style=""> </span>Though he had programmed her to exhibit orgasm, she simply lay expressionless. He frequently spied her standing naked and looking vacantly at her dejected oval face in the bathroom mirror. The sight of her back used to arouse him and he would pounce upon her, but she used to respond like a rubber doll. She even stopped talking to him. When he spotted the dark circles under her eyes, he immediately contacted her manufacturers, Messer Rastogi and Sons. Their robot, one of those dull expressionless and matter-of-fact machines, arrived and discovered that some of Asha’s essential files were corrupt, significant data stolen and replaced with some substandard sequences of self-executable instructions. She was simply beyond repair. ` Do not connect your bionic mates to the intergalactic networks', the robot had cautioned him, ` And if you to buy more skins, then you would better procure them from a good retail outlet.<span style=""> </span>It is extremely<span style=""> </span>unsafe to download them'<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">Organisms from all the neighbourhood planets would flock to Rodeo to shop for their annual provisions: the newest biochips for their bodies, body part replacements, popular software, virtual games, latest security packages, and programmable mates. Repugnant creatures from the surrounding planets sickened him. He shuddered at the sight of those huge cockroach-like insects from some god-forsaken planet shopping for androids. He wondered what they did with them. Angiras had purchased Asha from a similar mall last year and had grown quiet fond of her. He even repented dismantling her and felt he would have kept her even if she were disobeying his instructions. He loved her for her sadness. It made her almost human. Funnily, he had grown to like her inability to live with him or to relate to him. His compassion got better of him and he had her dismantled. He remembered inquiring with Messers Rastogi if they could construct another mate for him who resembled Asha. They replied that she was an outdated piece and they had better utilities nowadays, which not only looked better but also felt better. Besides, these utilities were far more compliant to the customer’s wishes. They also had an up-to-the-minute user-friendly interface, which allowed the customer to personalize them effortlessly. Nevertheless, Asha’s departure left him a strange feeling of vacuity and an unexplainable sorrow.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><span style=""> </span>`Never ever fool around with real human females', Angiras’s mother had admonished him when she was alive. `For, they would not give you what you want and would only make you cry'. `Did you make Dad cry too mommy?' Angiras remembered asking her much to her annoyance. `I never saw your father and I never cared for any human male', she had answered applying mettalic red coloured nail polish. He remembered how the wrinkles on her aging face deepened as she looked away. He recollected his mother keeping a programmable bionic female as a domestic help who slept with her as part of her duty. Angiras was drawn to this slave and he was furious when his mother refused to modify the programme a little so that he could have a little bit of fun with her. He watched in horror his mother started resembling the android female in her blank look and coldness. He even suspected that both of them hated him. Some days later, the software of the domestic help was corrupted and she started disregarding her mistress and so his mother had disposed her. Angiras sighed and felt that even after one generation they don’t make bionic mates who don’t conk out. He wished that technology should evolve faster. After that incident, his mother became increasingly bitter in her life and finally decided to deanimate herself. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">Angiras worked for a small accounting firm owned by someone who lived in a different galaxy. The employer was so amiable that Angiras suspected him of being some sort of machine working for an unknown big shot. He had a terrible time when he had worked for humans. He felt it was high time some smart chap invented software that would make humans less insecure and less attention seeking. The more authority they had, the more insecure they would become and more attention seeking their behaviour would be. And what about envy, Angiras mused; there is no software, no genetic engineering project that would silence the gene of envy. Even after all this horseshit about human progress, there is very little we have gained on this front.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">Even though he lived in an admirably compliant house, the memory of his mother’s assistant along with Asha`s case more recently, the thoughts returing home and his home going berserk at times used to turn his stomach. The home discerned his genetic information, moderated the temperature, cooked food for him, and showcased his favourite programmes on the monitors after judging his mood. It also kept a genial watch on his health and symptoms of abnormal behaviour. Occasionally, Angiras used to think that his home was in fact his father and smile at such thoughts. These days it had repeatedly warned him often of depressive behaviour and recommended physiochemical repair for his brain. He had activated the robotic physician of his home and he had managed to restore his hormonal balance many times. Nevertheless, these days it used to happen too frequently. The physician suggested he should try keeping a mate, preferably an gynoid.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">`Because there is a risk in having a human,’ the tin head spoke in the Angiras’ pre-recorded digital voice, ` You hardly find a compatible specimen. It would be a better idea if you purchase another programmable bionic companion and personalize it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">`What will happen if it goes the way the previous one did,’ asked Angiras sceptically. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">`It would be a better option even then,' the tin head answered shrugging. `There is less danger of infection too.'<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">Angiras decided to trust the machine’s wisdom. Unsurprisingly it had more faith in ones of its own kind. Curiously, thought Angiras, his advice matched his mother’s.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">In fact, he knew no one who lived with human companions these days. Some of them had tried to live together but had later on decided to go in for machines. Moreover, most of the human females had lost interest in human males long ago. They kept female androids that were not only quite capable of protecting them but were also far more reliable. They were also more fun in bed as they instinctively understood what the other wanted. When they felt like reproducing, like his mother they would simply walk into a<span style=""> </span>near-by gene bank, selected, and ordered the suitable genes for their offspring. God alone knew what his mother desired when she sent for his father’s genes. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">When he was growing up, he was drawn to many women, only to find that women were not being drawn to him. They were interested in those who were better looking, more intelligent and richer than Angiras. In short, they preferred chaps who had better genes to him. Since he resembled his mother, he was not as good looking as others. He had taken her weak chin, nervous eyes, and a tendency to put on weight. He must have inherited his height and morose detached expression from his unknown father. These days you can engineer the code even better, silence many of these genes, and have a better body. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">Though he knew many friends who went in for the<span style=""> </span>things like having male bionic mate, Angiras found the idea unthinkable. That thing would resemble him too closely. You cannot really think of fucking your own reflection. Therefore, after considerable thought, he decided to go to Rodeos and buy an interesting cybernetic mate. He had a feeling that he would never have a real companion in his life.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">Rodeo was a gigantic labyrinthine mega market, swarming with organisms from diverse planets in the solar system. Angiras walked into a huge superstore where they displayed all types of companions and pets. He saw a group of women watching a large convertible mannequin who had a fairly long piston and a pair of big breasts. There were also many animals and polar bears were particularly popular with women. Men were interested in the serpents with adjustable head sizes and the monkeys with red buttocks. Angiras felt ashamed of his preferences. He thought he was ordinary, conventional, and boring. He glanced upon an attractive pair of female legs and walked up to it. The store attendant, a plain looking woman in blue uniform, who Angiras suspected of being a programmed android approached him and asked, `May I help you sir?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">Angiras looked at her and found a strange twinkle in her eyes and warmth in her smile that he did not associate with programmable bionic mates. She smiled and took down the pair of legs and asked, ` May I show you the rest of her?’<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">Angiras nodded. She went into a room and as she walked, Angiras grumpily watched her back. She brought the rest of the android from a hanger. Angiras watched her assemble the naked torso, the pair of legs, and the remaining parts. The sincerity with which an unprogrammed human female did her work surprised him. He would have enjoyed simply watching her as she went about her work unaware of his presence. He felt like holding her hand and touching her palm to confirm she was real. Under the pretext of looking at the android, Angiras brushed against the attendant’s hand. The touch of human tissue astonished him. He had never touched a human female before. The attendant looked at him peculiarly and Angiras tried to control himself. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">She fished out a remote control device from her uniform pockets.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">` You can vary the size of her breasts with this.’<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">She demonstrated how the naked torso responded to the remote control. The breasts puffed up into the size of melons and then shrunk to the size of gooseberry. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">` You can hold them, sir, and find out how real they feel.’<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">Angiras did not want to find out.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">` I will never know how real they feel because I have never felt the real ones in my life.’ He said. The bluntness caught her off guard. She did not know what to say and looked at him in bewilderment. Angiras looked elsewhere and then held her hand. She did not withdraw.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">` Will you live with me?’ He blurted and felt very awkward.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">The woman laughed so loudly that the customers in the shop looked at them in surprise.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">` But I am not programmable, sir.’ and politely withdrew her hand.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">Angiras was embarrassed. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">` I know. I just wondered if you are not living with anyone, we should give it a try.’<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">`But I simply don’t know how to play either mother or slave to the male of our species.’ She laughed, still unable to believe her ears. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">She looked at the gauche man in front of her with a twinkle in her eye and flicked her hair. He was not looking at her.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">`Besides she is prettier. She will look after you when you are ill, make coffee for you in the morning, and do all the things you want her to do.’<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN"><span style=""> </span>The attendant did not know why she was reasoning with this man. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">` You need not execute the instructions I give you. I will obey your commands instead. But having you just by my side will make all the difference.’<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">` When I was very young, I remember some boys telling me similar things. But I discovered that they all wanted was a slave who would slog for them and spread when they wanted, or that they wanted momma who would breastfeed them when they were sad and change their nappies when they were ill. And if we ever feel like cuddling and hugging a hairy thing we can always have a polar bear, a male android or something.’<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">Angiras looked at the floor in silence.He felt as though as if a looming skyscraper had collapsed within him and the entire cosmos had caved into a blackhole.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">` In fact if you look at this gynoid, you will discover that she is admirably designed to suit all the needs of human males. With this latest skin-changing utility you can even make her resemble your mother or sister or someone.’<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">`Cant we give it a try...? Angiras interrupted, almost pleadingly, without looking at her.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">`Sorry sir, I am simply not interested in such experiments. She said harshly, ` I can’t take risk and let human males ruin my life. It’s the only one I have.There is even less danger of some abominable disease.’<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IN">Angiras walked out of the departmental store into the darkness. He did not know where he was going. He was crying. <o:p></o:p></span></p> Sachin C. Ketkarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09429849773311198305noreply@blogger.com1