Dionysus in Gandhi’s Ahmedabad

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 `Dionysus and the City’ (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,

` 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)

Professor Spears in his insightful analysis points out that the word City etymologically comes from the civitas, city-state, which is properly an aggregation of cives, citizens and the term civilization too comes from the same root. As a poetic trope, it stands for both the city within and the city without. 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, Civitas Terrena or the Earthly City was seen as striving towards a Heavenly City, Civitas Dei, but for moderns, says Prof Spears, it is seen as falling or fallen and moving towards the Infernal City the City of Dis, the city of Dante and Baudelaire, and of Eliot. In short, when the modernist poets paint the city in dark and sinister colours, they are in many ways censuring and negating the process of urbanization as well as the entire foundation of civilization, they are criticizing the city within and without. If modern city stands for modernity, then modernism, as a cultural movement often stands in contradiction and negation to modernity.

However, the relationship between the city and the village is crucial not just in analysis of modernism, but also for entire literary historiography and historical analysis of culture as demonstrated by Raymond Williams’ seminal book ` The Country and the City’(1973). Giving a lucid and rigorous analysis of shifting values, perceptions and associations of the opposition between the country and the city as embodied in English literary history, Williams remarks that this contrast,` is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society’. (1973:289). He argues that capitalism, as a mode of production, is the basic process of most of what we know as the history of country and city. He cites Marx and Engels from the Communist Manifesto where they say, ` the bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns...has created enormous cities...has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones.’ (1973:303).

Williams, in spite of being a Marxist, is critical of the idea implicit within Marxism and socialism, the avowed enemies of capitalism, in their perception that the city is more `advanced and progressive’ than the country because the industrial capitalism is a more progressive than the feudal capitalism. However, what is important to us in our analysis of the relationship between modernism and the city in the Indian context is Raymond Williams’ awareness of relevance of this thesis to cultures beyond the British and the western culture. He is aware of the fact that the historical process he is studying is `now effectively international, means that we have more than material for interesting comparisons. ‘(1973:292)

While it would be illuminating to examine the imagery and sensibility associated with the urban experience in the modernist Indian poetry, I would be delimiting myself to 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:

` and the evening ( with lipstick decorating her lips)

Kisses the streets and lanes;

Hundreds of mercury lamps dance to the Jazzy beats,

And fires find their way into gutters.

The orphaned dreams wandering and lost at midnight

Weep for a while and turn silent.

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. 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.

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.

You might never see it again

This city playing in the sands

You might never catch a glimpse of it again

On the plains of your memory

Fill up its fragrance in your breath

You might never catch the scent of its wet earth again

Ahmedabad emerges as an idyllic Eden from which Adam and Eve are driven away. The ghazal ends with romantic idealization of the motherland:

Let me rub the dust of my homelands to my forehead, `Adil’

Who knows I may never see the dust in my life again.

However, not all are so sad to leave Ahmedabad or mind losing the so-called ` Paradise’:

Ahmedabad

Manilal Desai

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.

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.

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.

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:

My City

Chinu Modi

You won’t find any fog here anymore

Even if every mill is shut down

No heart melts here anymore

The city exhausted of serving Gandhi

Violently seeks vengeance in innumerable ways

My city: Ahmedabad

They measure your shadows

Not bodies

To stitch clothes;

Here you have to live like bugs

On borrowed breath

Roads are of tar here

And sunlight black as tar

Falls here

My city: Ahmedabad

This city is an old man

Groaning with constipation

This city is all the fancy aerobics

Of a back broken spider

It’s a museum of fallen stars

A grand crematory

Incessantly

Incinerating corpses

My city: Ahmedabad.

Tomorrow a rabbit

Will prey on a dog

Will reduce my honour

To ashes

Who knows what sins of my past life

Is this city avenging?

I cant forego it even for a moment

And it doesn’t let me live

In peace even for a while

O Ahmedabad

Why did you become Karnavati again?

Why don’t you become Aasapalli?

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.

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:

AHMEDABAD 1974 AND 1984

Sahil Parmar

The outstretched sky plays its own tune

Scattered stars

Flicker feebly

Like the squeaking whistles

Of cloth mills razed by fire

The horizons hazy

Due to the suppressed sobbing

The moon is pulverized

One...two...three...ten...a dozen fragments

Falling upon this city

Crushing

Millions of people

Millions of eyes

Millions of dreams

Under them.

This city is now a crematory of dreams

Darkness like a cemetery

Wrings this city

Before I choke

I can only say

`That hostel mess bill was a very big event indeed!”

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.

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 ` 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.

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.

Notes:

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.

WORKS CITED

1. Dennis Walder ed. Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990

2. EV Ramakrishnan, Making It New: Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi Poetry’, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1995

3. Monroe K Spears, Dionysus and the City: Modernism in Twentieth Century Poetry, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970

4. Raymond Williams, Modernism and the Metropolis. In Walder ed. 1990, p.166

5. -------------------------The Country and the City, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

6. Sahil Parmar, Mathaman. A collection of Gujarati poems. Self Published. Gandhinagar, 2004

7. Suresh Dalal and Jaya Mehta ed. Adhunik Gujarati Kavita’Mumbai: Sahitya Akademi 1989

The article appeared in New Quest, Pune, June 2009

SCANNING FOR TROJANS IN INDIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH: HEMANT DIVATE’S VIRUS ALERT

Virus Alert: Poems by Hemant Divate, translated from Marathi by Dilip Chitre, Mumbai: Poetrywala, 2004, pp. 76, Rs. 100/-

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.

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.

If we are to hypothetically consider English translation from the bhashas at par with Indian Poetry in English, a collection like ` Virus Alert’ is a rarity in Indian writings in English. Going by the canons of Indian English poetry, something like

` Dhullu is switching the TV on and off with the remote

He’s telling me to switch on one channel after another

Till his favourite channel is found

Any moment soon after

He begins to hate the channel..(p.2)

Would be considered `too loose’, ` too direct’ and less informed by the Anglo American modernist aesthetics of formal precision, irony and mythopoetic imagery. 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.

Yet one cannot fail to acknowledge that there 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.

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:

“ One is just a domesticated animal kept by this city

The one that sniffs around the city the whole day long

Day by day

One’s turning into a fuckin’

Unprinted roll of newsprint thats found defective

Or the key number in the material of an ad

A pimp, a pimp, a pimp...( p.12)

Or consider how the poem whose title says it all ends:

“ and Hemant Dayanand Divate

Belongs to no one anymore

He belongs to the e-universe

And here too he gets waylaid and screwed

But he hardly lets out an `e’ from his mouth

He utters` Aai-ee-ga!’

(And here too he gets screwed, p.19)

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.

The speaker is always afraid of losing his individuality, not to mention his sanity, under the cultural bulldozer of globalization:

I

Am forgetting

Me

No trace remains

Of colour, form, speech, touch, or meaning

To me

There does not remain

God, parents, relations

No remainder

Like caste, class, religion, nationality, language, script

Breath, mind, body and soul

I am reaching out

Beyond birth and death

I don’t know

Me

(p.29)

The standardization and homogenization of culture that globalization threatens people is a real danger, especially for the poets.

Uniformity

While reading the poems of contemporary poets

You do not

As the blind in the parable

Of Chakradhara do

Feel the whole elephant

But feel it as though it were a piller, a wall, and so forth

And therefore perhaps

If a poem

By one of you is

Passed around as anyone else’s

It wont add a whit

To language.

(p.28)

The speaker is paranoid and self obsessed hypochondriac who worries about poetry being bedridden in this time of great cultural crisis.

The Poem Should Not Be Bedridden

Word constipated poem

Its skin’s become prickly

Its restless, itchy

Slowly, its sores will fester

Begin to stink as well

Language languishing as through under a curfew

Words silent as though prohibited from assembling

With this sort of strict patrolling

One cant even curse meanings

Freely

(p.34)

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.

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.

Hemant’s poetry will definitely appeal to younger readers of poetry in English translation for its freshness and unsentimental directness.

This Review Appeared in The Dhauli Review, Sept 2008

A THIRD WAY OF READING KOLATKAR: BEYOND FORMALISM AND POLITICS

The 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’, 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.

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.

While formalist criticism will find Kolatkar 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.

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.

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.
Consider a poem from Jejuri:

The Reservoir
There isn’t a drop of water
In the great reservoir the Peshwas built.

There is nothing in it.
Except a hundred years of silt.

(Jejuri p.36)

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.

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

“I look a bit like
a seventeenth century map of Mumbai
with its seven islands” (p.16)


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.

On reading the poems in `An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (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.

In a Room Next to Death

In a room next to death
In a hotel in a way out town…
Lizards on the wall
Will cast my horoscope

In the ill humoured room in the hotel
Ina a way out town
Witness to masturbation
Will be spider in sardonic corner….

(In a Room Next to Death, An Anthology of Marathi Poetry, translation Dilip Chitre, and p.127)

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 Sarpa Satra, 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.

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’.

The Weeping Woman III

The splayed butterfly of the handkerchief
Is sitting
On your face

Drunk
On the honey
Of the dark lotuses of the eyes

Now how will it lift
Its wings daubed with pollens
Of grief

It will be difficult
No very difficult
For it to fly in this state

I don’t think
The Pandavas of tear
Will permit it to fly

(The Weeping Woman III, Bhijki Wahi, p.287 , translation Sachin Ketkar )

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:

When all this filth flows out
Out of your eyes
Then only a pure drop of tear
Just one
Will remain in the end
Save it in the eye
It will be the useful one
To create afresh
The Universe

O
Cosmic Mother
(The Last Tear, translated by Dilip Chitre, New Quest 157-158 July Dec 2004)

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,

`How will the poor woman know
That the goldsmith whom he had approached with her anklets
Accused him of theft
And that police have finished him in an encounter?’

( Bhijki Vahi, 197 translation Sachin Ketkar)



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

`winding verses stir him up
the turreted epic shrugs him off…

from valmiki’s roof top rama jumps
disturbing a tile or two... .’

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.

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.



REFERENCES

Amit Chaudhari, `On Strangeness of Indian Writing’ in The Hindu (October 2, 2005)

Bruce King. "Two Bilingual Experimentalists: Kolatkar and Chitre." Modern Indian Poetry in English. Delhi: OUP, 1987, 162-82

Dilip Chitre. An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (1945-1965). Bombay: Nirmala Sadananda Publishers, 1967

____”_____ translation of Arun Kolatkar’s ` The Last Tear’ and `Reduced to Beggary by Mumbai’ in New Quest, 157-158, July Dec 2004

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)

Of Pathare and Prejudice: Or Reading Contemporary Marathi Poetry

The 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.

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.

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:

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)

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.
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

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.

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.

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!

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’, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the poem titled ` Shopping at Mega-Mall’, the speaker realizes that he has turned into a commodity a consumer item and is being displayed in the mega mall.

I am Whisper Sanitary Napkin
Lying on the first rack
And I am dreaming of living very close to a young girl
Absorbing her juices.

Or that I am a Huggies Nappy Pad on the second rack
And I am accumulating the excreta as I snuggle
some infant
Who I look after tenderly
For five to six hours.

Or I am a high-priced toilet soap
Camay, Yardley or Lux International

The consumer becomes the consumed; the subject becomes the object, not just any object but an object to be sold in a flashy wrapper as the entire world turns into a one huge Mega-mall. This indeed is a dehumanizing predicament.

Or I am the television
And the entire family is sitting in front of me
Eating and surfing my channels
Or that they have switched me off
And have left me alone in this room
Or that I am a foot wipe
Costing twelve bucks
Given free with a purchase
Of upholstery
Good looking
Yet my master coming out of the bathroom
Is wiping his wet feet on me

Or that I am a broom
With which the folks
Are causally cleaning their floor
Or dusting away cobwebs.

My mistress drops me
While using me
And dreams of a vacuum cleaner.
She spits on me
Even if I touch her husband's body
By mistake.

This sense of commodification of self is also an awareness of being used, abused and used as a foot wipe. The last stanza quoted above is almost an example of Dalit poetry, where the owner of the broom spits on it dreaming of vacuum cleaner. The consciousness of the dehumanizing, asphyxiating and sinister aspects of globalization pervades poetry of many contemporary poets like Hemant Divate. 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.

Manya Joshi’s poems often touch upon the segregation of human being from a human being in the age of `communication’ revolution. His poem ` An Announcement for Mr and Mrs Limaye’ can be read as an expression of alienation in the `global village’:

An Announcement for Mr. & Mrs. Limaye

i)

Mrs. Limaye aap jahan
Kahibhi ho forein
Mulund station par chale aaiye
Wahan aapke pati
Aapka intezaar kar rahe hai

ii)

Maalik who is sabka ek
Bang everyone
O Shirdi king Sai Baba bang bang

iii)
People lose their way
People lose each other
People make civil statements
On a superbuiltup world

iv)

In a public local train
There is an unimagined itchiness
On your private emotions
You mentally advertise it to yourself

v)

Mr. & Mrs. Limaye
Hiding behind popular philosophies
Wait for
Each other
Facing each other.

The poem which mixes up registers and languages expresses how people lose each other and are alienated from one another. In spite of being a very small world, a married couple travelling in Mumbai suburban train fails to recognize each other on the crowded railway platform. Manya Joshi’s perception of the predicament of alienation in the `super built up’ world is not celebratory. It is a rather agonizing situation from which even Sai Baba cannot save us. 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.

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.

References
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by G Bennington, B. Massumi, Manchester University Press, 1984

Nitin Rindhe, `Aajchya Kavitetli `Navta’ ani Samikshakanchi Gochi’, Abhidhanantar,, Mumbai, April-June, 2006

Richard Appignanesi, Chris Garratt , ` Introducing Postmodernism’, Icon Books, 1999

Sachin Ketkar ed. And trans. ` Live Update: An Anthology of Recent Marathi Poetry’, Poetrywala, Mumbai, 2004

Sridhar Tilve, Teekaharan, Shabdavel Prakashan, Kolhapur, 1999