Who is a Malayali Anyway?
G. Arunima In 1806, an Anglican priest called Claudius Buchanan travelled to Kerala from Bengal to understand the relationship between Hindus, Jews and Christians there. In a letter that he wrote back home to one Sandys (possibly a colleague), Buchanan declares: “the bonds of infidelity and superstition are loosening fast.” In an extraordinary travelogue, collected and edited in several volumes of memoirs, he describes the different religious groups he met all over Travancore, their histories as he understood them, and what he saw to be their most distinctive attributes. What makes this fascinating ethnography remarkable is the complexity of Buchanan’s point of view. He was at once an Anglican amongst Syrians and Latin Catholics, a white missionary amongst co-religionists of a different race, an observer with a partisan interest in spreading the word. Buchanan’s meticulously maintained diary becomes one of the earliest accounts of the religious complexity of Kerala, which is often taken for granted without adequate scrutiny in contemporary discussions of the region and its past. It is a different matter that his narratives also throw a light on the emergence of print technology and public sphere in Kerala. But that is another story. Buchanan narrates a delightful tale of his meeting with the priests (kasheesha) and elders in Mavelikara. Initially they were suspicious of whether he was a Christian at all and what his motivations were. Moreover, they were perturbed by his suggestions that they should translate their bible! They said that they could not depart from their bible because it was the true Bible of Antioch we have had in the mountains of Malabar for fourteen hundred years, or longer. They questioned Buchanan and his Western translations and in order to convince themselves that he was a true Christian and the copies he carried with him reliable. They set about to compare four copies of the third chapter of St. Mathew’s Gospel, in Eastern and Western Syrian, English and one Thomas’s translation in Malayalam. At the end of the exercise they found that all the translations were fine, except for the one into Malayalam. They had never seen a printed Syriac New Testament before and were astonished to see one, but every priest took a turn to read a portion from it, which they did fluently. Most of the places had ancient copies of the Scriptures, or of some part of them. Of these, the texts most commonly read were the Oreta, or the former part of the Old Testament, the Evangelion, the Praxeis and the Egarta. The Prophets were the rarest. In Buchanan’s account, despite the initial resistance, most of the priests were amenable to the idea of translating the Bible into Malayalam. In a letter to one Henry Thornton on 24 December 1806 he writes, “Syrian is still their sacred language,and some of the laymen understand it; but the Malayalim[sic] is the vulgar tongue. I proposed to send a Malayalim translation of the Bible to each of the Churches; and they assured me, that every man who could write would be glad to make a copy for his own family.” They also assured him that they would establish schools in each parish for Christian instruction in Malayalam, which would be undertaken by four of the chief elders there, where the Bible in Malayalam would be the principle text book. Two issues become apparent at this point. One, the complex mediation of Christianity in Kerala via the intervention of the Western church to the extent that even the idea of making the Bible available to the average parishioner in Malayalam appears to have come from outside. The second: that the initial need for print technology here, as in the case of Europe, too, seems to be coming from the desire to increase the circulation of the Bible. These two matters: that of language and of an emergent print culture has been central to discussions of modernity and the creation of ethnic identities, principally that of nationalism. But about that some other day. But the contemporary issues of Malayali identity also crucially go back to the pre-colonial interactions and today I’d like to talk about the originary myths of one particular group: the Syrian Christians. For more than a thousand years Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus have lived together in Kerala. By the 20th century, the term Malayali was used to designate all these people across community or caste difference. In fact, as soon as Kerala is viewed within the wider social geography of the Indian Ocean—an all together different ‘regional space,’ the story about the insider/and outsider, belonging and identity take a different meaning. If we examine Kerala’s history as the narrative of these different groups as an integral part of its social fabric, what is immediately evident is that such a cultural mix was possible only because Kerala was connected to an extended network: from the Arab world on the west towards China on the east with large parts of the present South East Asia linked to it through established networks of trade. This connection meant that Kerala not only nurtured a vibrant commercial culture but also that it had become home to people from diverse parts of this world, with their different cultural practices and belief systems. From religion and ritual, dietary and culinary practices, and new technological inputs, to a rich history of loan words that are an integral part of present day Malayalam language, today’s Kerala is shaped by the history of its geographical positioning. We gain an interesting tapestry if we consider the ‘origin myths’ about the arrival of the Jews, Syrian Christians, Mappilla Muslims and Nambudiri Brahmins – the four main groups that came and settled in Kerala somewhere between the 4th and 9th centuries CE. By juxtaposing conventional histories of Kerala with these stories of arrival and settlement, by means of trying to understand this complex past, one also hopes to isolate moments and contexts that are indicative of rather assertive religious identities at certain points of time. One of
A Life Less Ordinary
Yajnaseni Chakraborty Her tiny, birdlike frame seems lost in the embrace of a large, plush sofa in an anteroom of the business centre at the Oberoi Grand. But Nadine Gordimer still spells personality with a capital P. At 84, she is a beautiful woman, her delicate face framed by silver grey hair, her eyes a clear blue-black. I have been warned that she may terminate the interview if she doesn’t like the questions (she hates interviews anyway), so of course my list of questions seems totally inadequate. Besides, she has fixed me with a firm stare and announced that she refuses interviews that aren’t recorded. “I want you to write what I have said,” she tells me softly but clearly, with just a trace of her South African lilt. “Not what you think I’ve said, and I talk quickly, too.” I assure her I will faithfully write down every word, and she looks doubtful for a moment before compressing her lips and signaling me to get on with it. So I nervously do. Because Nadine Gordimer the anti-apartheid activist is so much part of Nadine Gordimer the writer, I start off asking her about the battles she has fought, and continues to fight. “I played a small role. I didn’t go to jail, as many of my comrades did. I went as far as my courage would allow,” she says. “You see, I am first of all a writer, I was born that way, but I am also a human being.” In a lecture delivered in Kolkata the previous evening, Gordimer has alluded to the moral and social responsibility of the writer, and when the question comes up again, now, she carefully dissociates such responsibility from “propaganda”. She categorises her writings alongside those of Athol Fugard and Andre Brink and Es’kia Mphahlele (which she pronounces ‘Empashlele’, and when I imitate her correctly, I earn the verbal equivalent of a pat on the back). “We were living at a time when we had to write the truth, the bits that were never reported in the newspapers. But then, governments never listen to writers.” Evidently they do, considering the bans imposed on three of her novels by the apartheid government. “I’m glad they were banned. No bans would have been worrying,” she says wryly. By now, Gordimer has unbent enough to discuss any possible crisis of faith that she may have faced, and I feel I am allowed to ask who she turned to during those crises. She agrees she is an atheist with left-wing sympathies, explains that the source of her faith is “our responsibility to each other”, and then wistfully turns to her favourite poet W.B. Yeats: “What do we know but that we face/ One another in this lonely place?” The question of ‘responsibility’ is evidently a significant one in her life. It is the single most important reason why she never really considered leaving South Africa. Her late husband, Reinhardt Cassirer, belonged to a notable family of Berlin Jews. He arrived in South Africa as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and studied in London and Heidelberg. “He wasn’t Africa born and bred like me, and he had a nostalgic love for London, I suppose, so we did toy with the idea of living there for a while, but in the end I realized I was too attached to Africa,” she smiles. As a white South African who established deeply personal bonds with the anti-apartheid movement, Gordimer nevertheless remains reserved and unsentimental about the risks she must have run as a supporter of the once outlawed African National Congress. But her face lights up in a rare smile when she recalls the experience of standing in a mixed-race queue to vote in her country’s first post-apartheid election. “It was the best experience of my life,” she says. Better than the Nobel Prize? “Yes it was, really.” Mixed race brings us to the question of Indians in South Africa, who, Gordimer notes approvingly, did not flee the country as those in Kenya did. “They stayed and went to prison,” she smiles again. And Kenya, the home of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s forefathers, naturally brings us to why she has called his Bend in the River “a racist book”. I point out that her remark is likely to be quoted out of context to indicate the man rather than his book. “You think so?” she replies. “I’m sorry to hear that. He’s a great writer, which is why the book disappointed me.” And then she adds, with no real remorse, “Maybe I shouldn’t have said what I did, then.” It’s nearing the end of my allotted time, and Gordimer hasn’t glanced at her watch more than once, purely out of habit, I assume. We’ve covered a lot of ground, talking about the small but growing Black South African middle class with particular reference to the software industry, the Indian middle class too (“I loved Mr Varma’s Great Indian Middle Class”), the shanties outside Kolkata airport, the plight of poor, unemployed young people who take to violence (not least in South Africa), why the South African cricket team may never have the required share of Black players, and why South African president in waiting Jacob Zuma’s motto is: Bring Me My AK-47 (“he doesn’t say it much now, though”). She has shown me a sketch her granddaughter made in Mumbai (“she sketches beautifully”), and a newspaper clipping about parallels between India’s long-standing democracy and South Africa’s still-nascent one. I try to introduce Taslima Nasreen into the conversation, considering Gordimer has been on various anti-censorship boards, but she doesn’t respond, as I had hoped she would, with a brief tirade. Instead, her face aglow, she holds forth on how South Africa no longer has censorship, “except if someone actively preaches violence”. The pride on her face as she says this is proof enough, one feels, of a life less ordinary. Thank God she liked the questions. (This was recorded in November 2008) Yajnaseni Chakraborty is
The Blind Art of the Concrete
Pothik Ghosh The real when it has reached the mind, is already not real any more. Our too thoughtful, too intelligent eye. —Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer Modern man is cursed with too much of seeing. His every waking moment is suffused and saturated with objects, images, concepts and signs. Such is this profusion of forms that he neither has time nor the inclination to really see what he has to see. And he is oblivious of the virtues of blindness. But can blindness be a virtue? The work of painter Benodebehari Mukherjee – who had a congenitally defective vision, went completely blind in 1957 aged 53, and yet continued to paint for another 23 years – alludes to the visual richness that blindness, and its seeking, can sometimes yield. There is a lot of variety in Mukherjee’s art. But what brings them together is the unity of his aesthetic approach, which sought tirelessly to overcome the world of objects and optical verisimilitude and penetrate their essence. Much of his work, post blindness, is characterised by an almost complete disappearance of opticality, with objects being reduced to their archetypes. Not surprisingly, the human and animal figures of his paper-cuts and collages lack eyes. Two of his post-’57 lithographs – Curd Seller and Kitchen – are examples of how objects are merely alibis for the artist to explore various interactions among certain essential forms and structures. But his creations, even before he lost his sight, are marked by a struggle to escape objects and their sheer optical presence. From the very beginning, Mukherjee, as his art indicates, was interested not in things but in relationships among them. Even his self-portraits explore relationships between physiognomy and the character of his inner being. Mukherjee was also drawn to forces that constitute figures and objects rather than the finished ‘things’ themselves. His Artist Observing a Frog is more about capturing the state of two human figures looking at a frog than the visual event per se. This yearning for non-opticality brings Mukherjee close to Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon, in spite of their distance in space and tradition. The field of Bacon’s paintings, as philosopher Gilles Deleuze has accurately pointed out, lacks depth, and he situates his figures in a way that it appears they are dissolving. Clearly then, Mukherjee, an important member of the Bengal school, was not the only one to have quested after artistic blindness: a metaphor for capturing the unseen in art that is all about seeing. But his loss of vision became a dramatic, physical culmination of this search. Orhan Pamuk, who is preoccupied by this aesthetic of ‘non-seeing’ in his My Name is Red, gives a detailed account of the tradition of blindness-seeking among the 12th-13th century masters of Perso-Islamic miniatures. They considered blindness to be the supreme accomplishment of their artistic métier so much so they would often pierce their own eyes with needles specially designed for the purpose. For them, blindness implied the victory of sacred timeless vision over profane human gaze. The human eye is a compulsive ejaculator of meaning. It is also a repository of pre-conceived notions and ideas. Objects are rendered meaningful only within cages of concepts and forms cast on to them. There is no room for the object to show itself autonomously. Blindness, in such circumstances, is the decimation of the predetermined gaze, if only to set the object free. It is driven by, what French philosopher Gaston Bachelard chose to call, “material imagination”, something that he contrasted with what he called “formal imagination”. The former seeks to shun all formal preconceptions to experience the world directly in its essential and elemental materiality. Mukherjee’s attempt to penetrate the visual realm to get to the essences chimes with Swiss painter Paul Klee’s. The deliberate infantilism and primitivity in Klee’s paintings allude to the elemental world beyond the realm of our fabricated modern reality. Klee’s search for essences was driven by a desire to go back to the roots of the “art image”. Mukherjee’s ‘blind search’ resonates with the ancient mystic traditions of Bengal: of Ramakrishna, the Bauls and Lalanpanthis, Chaitanya and Aatish Dipankara, the 10th-11th century Buddhist monk from erstwhile east Bengal, who journeyed to Tibet to revive Tantric Buddhism. Such mysticism emphasised the dissolution of the individual and his gaze into the world. The idea of non-seeing, which emerged from such mysticism, is not as simple as seeing or saying nothing. It is, in fact, seeing and saying much more than eyes and language can afford. It is faith, not in the sense of submitting to an impenetrable reality, but a state of absolute transparency between the human being and his world so as to preclude any attempt by the former to invade and know the latter. Mukherjee’s decision to paint the 8-foot high, 80-foot long Life of Medieval Saints mural on the three walls of Visva Bharati’s Hindi Bhavan was not pure chance. The mural, a seamless tapestry of Surdas, Kabir, Ravidas, Tulsidas, Guru Gobind Singh and other medieval Bhakti figures, is an expression of his historical vision that has little to do with the nationalistic grand narratives of his time. In its compositeness, the mural is shot through with the history of Bhakti, not only in the choice of subject but, more importantly, in its vision. History in this mural – which brings together the lives of various medieval saints separated in time and space – is not a mere chronology of events that were seen by human eyes as having unfolded in time. It is an experience, elusive to human eyes, of a timeless emotion. The emotion of “bhakti”. In his Shilpa Jigyasa (Art’s Quest), Mukherjee privileges the world of the primitive anonymous craftsman, ready to dissolve into his tradition, over that of the modern artist with his individual’s ego and gaze. However, his return to the ‘blind’ tradition of the artisan was much too ironical, and thus modern, to replicate the ‘repetitiveness’ of artisanal craftsmanship in
Liturgical Architecture
Dennis R. Mcnamara We live in an era that is not known for making beautiful churches. In fact, the sensus fidelium seems to indicate that something is indeed severely wrong with the unprofane architecture erected in the last few decades. Sometimes modern churches claim a vague Christian symbolism or association through shape or general motif, which is nonetheless found largely unsatisfactory. In other cases, purposeful attempts are made to avoid eschatological sacramentality. Many churches of the last half century seem to live up quite well to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s (who, along with Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, sought to offer an intellectual, faithful response to theological modernism) claim, adapted from Karl Barth, that without enthralling pangs of beauty, theology does not inspire. If it is in the very nature of beauty to transport us to rupture, Balthasar asks, how could we then possibly dispense with the concept of the beautiful that is sharp and yet tangible, something that abstract modernism undermines? This description certainly fits much of the church architecture of recent years. Yet, an unconsidered return to the Romantic historicism of nineteenth-century architecture cannot be a solution to today’s problems, despite the calls for traditional architecture appearing today. Even Ralph Adams Cram, twentieth century’s great proponent of a renewal of liturgical architecture through a return to medieval precedent, critiqued the nineteenth-century revivalists for their history-driven formalism. He called the Modernist “revolt” against the period’s parade of styles a laudable thing, but could not agree with its solutions, since “they were measurably inferior to what they have decried.” We find ourselves in a similar dilemma. A return to a purely Romantic approach to architecture is not a true solution though the romantic spirituality of the Christian artists and aesthetic philosophers of the last two centuries (from 1860 to the present) is strongly brought out by their preserving a sense of the unity of beauty and religion, art and religion, when they had almost no support from theology. A Balthasarian approach to liturgical architecture can avoid the pitfalls of both Romanticism and Modernism. To canonize a particular “style” of architecture only because of a historical association is an architectural aesthetic theology. However, the Modernist denial of historical styles precisely because of their historicity is also an architectural aesthetic theology. A Balthasarian solution beckons: begin by conceiving liturgical architecture as the form of Christ (Christus totus) in his sacramental, ecclesiological dimension in the liturgy. Liturgical architecture can therefore best be evaluated in light of its ability to bear the Christian message, that is, the “ontological secret” of the liturgical event, which by definition reveals beauty and results in joyfully rapturous discovery. Balthasar writes about the apologetic nature of his “fundamental theology,” saying “the heart of the matter should be the question: ‘How does God’s revelation confront man in history? How is it perceived?’” One could ask the same question in architectural terms: “How does God’s revelation confront man in liturgical architecture? How is it perceived?” Here we have an architecture that is claimed to reveal the divine, and that, on the basis of this claim, demands that we should believe and therefore expend our resources in a certain way despite the clear, rationalistic overarching demands of economy, functionalist utility, and the Zeitgeist. What basis acceptable to the liturgical-architectural establishment can we give these authoritative claims? Although the answer may seem redundant at first, it is worth stating that liturgical architecture is first and foremost liturgical, a bearer of the mystery of the anticipated eschatology of the Banquet of the Lamb. Balthasar speaks of the Church as an “event” in which the “power of the Christ-form expresses and impresses itself,” in which “the Lord becomes present in the assembly manifesting himself within it.” Both the Eucharist and the scriptures are described as making no sense unless enjoyed as a means of “impressing the Christ-form in the hearts of men.” Liturgical architecture can be understood in a similar manner. Liturgical architecture (and of course, figural art), as symbol of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb of the Heavenly Jerusalem, would make no sense without the Christian’s partaking in the invisible liturgy that it represents. As part of an architectural theological aesthetic, liturgical architecture is not primarily an example of the trends popular in Architectural Record, a neutral setting for the horizontal activities of an improperly understood “People of God,” or a “skin for liturgical action . . . which need not look like anything else.” Rather, liturgical architecture should be capable of becoming part of the cluster of symbols that make up the liturgical rite. In other words, it should be considered sacramental, making present by way of foretaste the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in the Heavenly Jerusalem. “If beauty is conceived of transcendentally, then its definition must be derived from God himself.” This emphasis on the sacramental, eschatological nature of Christian worship and its liturgical architecture finds a decided sympathy with Balthasar’s writings. The liturgy is certainly one place where the encounter with Christ is made available to us. In fcat, liturgy is made up of two distinct movements. “First God is made present through words, signs, and symbols,” then “people respond to God’s presence in their midst through word, song, and action.” This second movement is not a separate event, but a spontaneous response to the first. If architecture is part of the system of symbols that make God known, then it is not simply the neutral beige background common to the post-conciliar era, but part of the “eschatological orientation” that “endeavors to make the divine present through a type of eschatological anticipation.” Through its positive, beautiful images and sounds, and by its confident celebration of the eschatological banquet, it steps beyond the present-day signs of the kingdom’s distance and anticipates the time of the kingdom’s fullness. Thus, liturgical celebrations avoid the chaos, contingency, moral confusion, and existential anxieties that mark our transient lives. Liturgy needs the kind of eschatological anticipation implied by these characteristics if it is to offer