BHU: Pragmatism, Placation and Panic

Siddhant Mohan _____________________ Those who are oblivious or unperturbed about the sedition and felony charges brought against some students of Jawaharlal Nehru University are living in a better world. Important as it is, the media (and the powerful JNU alumni)—traditional, electronic and word of mouth—have made this news assume a larger than life dimension. Heroization of academic vanguardism has many worthy antecedents. While the incidents themselves are still unfolding and contingent, the reactions, abstractions and tales of glory brings a dimension of inevitability—an ironic form of heriozation perhaps? It is not surprising then that the national (and firmly nationalist now) and social media have been completely absent from another dramatic scene that was unfolding in Varanasi simultaneously: around hundred ABVP hooligans disrupted and vandalized a lecture event delivered by the academician, social scientist and Hindi poet Dr. Badri Narayan in Varanasi. Incidentally, he teaches in JNU. It happened on Valentine’s Day. Dr. Narayan was in Banaras Hindu University’s Art’s Faculty auditorium. He was delivering a special lecture organized in the memory of Late Kamla Prasad. The rubric: ‘Subaltern Societies and Indian Development.’ The Department of Hindi, BHU, was the chief organizer of the event. On the completion of his talk, Dr. Narayan answered few of the questions raised on the topic and took his seat. At some point Dr. Kashinath Singh, one of the foremost writers of our nation and an esteemed denizen of Varanasi, was delivering his presidential note. At that point the hooligans broke in. They were armed with the tricolour, saffron headbands, garish placards and with images of the soldiers who had recently died in Siachen. There entry and exit were book-ended with two matter-of-fact slogans, bereft of any ideology: ‘Stop the Program’ and ‘Maaro Joota Saale ko’ (Footwaer for the bastard!). Doubtless these rather universal and timeless slogans were directed at Dr. Narayan. While they were at the verge of assailing the stage, vandalize and eventually turn physical with the participants and spectators present there, a few Hindi poets confronted, argued and came together to neutralize the situation. The damage was done though—symbolically and emotionally. It is part of a larger pattern that is unfolding in institutes like BHU. To ponder on that, I take up the quill today. When ABVP activists ask how BHU dares to invite a professor from JNU who harbours a certain ethos, a political and literary sensibility which is not to their liking, it is in continuation of their condemnation of some other recent events in other parts of the nation, supported by the left and votaries of non-pragmatic identity politics. This is according to the script. What is not is the response: a professor from Hindi department, enlightened the ‘protesting’ students that if any anti-national is or was invoked in some other institute, BHU condemns it. The activists should seek an explanation from the administration as to how BHU dared to invite a professor from such a divisive and schismatic university. This placatory tone is characteristic of how we usually handle a contingent situation at hand: divert attention and make a temporary truce. But what price such quasi reconciliatory and paternalistic truce? One feels it emboldens a pattern in our institutions which has taken us away more and more from deliberative (or directly antagonistic) ways in public life. Even in a communitarian set up that marks a place like Varanasi, it means giving away a precious locational and affective space to an antagonist who is a master player in populist politics. Anyway, the din and brouhaha carried on for about 15 to 20 minutes. The poetry reading began soon after. Apart from Narayan himself, poets included Vyomesh Shukla, Ashish Tripathi, Anand Pradhan Sharma, Chandrakala Tripathi, Neeraj Khare and Baliraj Pandey. All of them condemned the attack and recited poems, many of which reverberated against fascism, colonialism and religious dictatorship. Only a handful of media houses reported this incident. Seemingly BHU itself has papered over this whole fracas. Life goes on. Or so it seems. The obvious factual question that can be raised against me is about my assertion that the hooligans were indeed ABVP members. But the fact of the matter is that the disruptors are quite brazen and upfront about it. Such is the level of their confidence in state backed majoritarianism of the kind hitherto unseen. They could target Dr. Narayan so easily because they have seen him on TV debates and there were his posters on the campus. Sources informed that someone had briefed the mobsters about the presence of JNU professor. They would not let go of such golden opportunity to score a point. Goons/Hooligans: I use such words with some hesitation. But advisedly too. Being judgmental too quickly is not a wise thing to do but not possessing a basic understanding of populist radical values operating in the chowks, mohallahs and premises of our nation is worse. For one, this form of populist universality is far from vague. Populism in our towns are a series of performative acts endowed with a rationality of its own, unto itself. Partly it is globalized aspiration. Partly a constant reconfiguration and unicity around a fictive idea of a mystical nation. Each new and heterogeneous incident and participation symbolically enhances populist reason. Its very mercenary nature allows, what Ernesto Laclau had called, a deeper homogeneity constructed by radical multiplicity of the popular—present as that which is absent. I am therefore using hooligan as a descriptive rather than as a purely pejorative term. The preferable word would be ‘activist’ except that there is no activism that is going on in our campuses and the adjoining areas now. Forms of pure retribution are void of any activist content. Activism does have a different meaning today though. Activism, nowadays, has come to mean treachery—of the nation and pater patria, pure and simple. Such is the level of heightened frenzy in the right voluntarist rhetoric at this point of time. It will be an important task for the social scientist to recalibrate and
On The Cold Dark Black Girnar: A Hanumana & Another

Amrit Gangar __________________ The sun has yet to tilt up perhaps a mile more to peep out of the ancient cleavages of the mount Girnār, much older than the Himālayas! No snow, only dark black rough rock that had once inhabited cultures and civilizations ranging from Shivaite to Buddhist to Jain to the primitive. Here on one of its peaks, as the legend goes, one Pāvāhari Baba was first initiated into the mysteries of practical yoga. Dattatraya had his abode here. In ancient times, the Girnār was called Raivata or Ujjayanta, and has been the temple-abode of the Jain Tirthankaras – Bāhubali, Neminātha, Pārsvanātha. In its womb, the mount Girnār nourishes mines of mysteries and caves of curiosities that never go to sleep at night with their eyes open, punctuated by the full moon or no moon and the strange sounds of cicadas. The sun is steady here in his movement, serene and soothing, intoxicated by his own fire, without soma. Lions stalk here, the ash smeared naked fakirs walk here fearlessly. Fear roams here fearfully in the narrow untouched virgin niches of the Girnār! A little away, hordes of bats hang on walls of the Adi Kadi Vaav, the fiftheenth century deep, dark ,unusual step-well, and the Navghan Kuvo, the well shy of a few years of being a thousand years old. A Gujarati proverb still lives and circulates around unsurreptitiously, “Adi Kadi Vaav ne Navghan Kuvo, Je Nā Juve te Jivto Muvo,” meaning, “Whoever has not seen the Adi Kadi step well (vaav) and Navghan well (kuvo), meets with death before dying.” But on the hills, death turns into life with Bhairav on the black rocks of Girirāj. Bhairav manifests here, and there. Shiva’s blue neck has gone bluer and no river flows from his thick black matted hair. Here on the Girnār plains flows a river named “Sonrekh”! “Oh! Se āmarā Subarnarekhā!” who said this? Where are you Sita? Abhiram? Where is your deserted airstrip? Your childhood playground? Ask all your gods, Girnār, to sing in chorus, “Aaj ki ananda… jhulat jhulane Shyamchanda…” From a Buddhist cave emerges a Shiva, in a Bahurupee! Buddha is tired of smiling here. Mahāvira, the Digambara, has dissolved into the wide open ambar, the sky that caresses the Girnar so giddily! Madness stalks here in the marrow of Time… And here on the Girnār, Hanumāna wears on different manifestations as the dark Bhairavs keep leaving behind their tantric footprints, you thought were yours! And one of the eleven faces of Hanumāna stares at you winking the monkey wink; still the sun has to tilt up many meters more to embrace the misty dawn of the hills overlooking the town of Junāgadh. Three poems for one wink… *** VĀNARA 1: LAMBE HANUMĀNA “O! Lords – Sun! Wind! Indra! Brahma! O! Bhutas! Let me turn taller than the mountain longer than the ocean,” prayed Hanumāna for Rāma his tail lengthening enlengthening on the steps of the Mount Girnār somewhere someone is chanting Sundarkānda, the red shot eyes you thought were owl’s were the ash smeared naked fakir’s the nāgābāwā, the Girnar’s child! “O! Sāgara! O! Vāyu!” prayed the vānara plunging into the Rāmāyana ocean paving the path, the vānara after vānara after vānara – brilliance of the dawn awaiting as Lambe Hanumāna caresses my face with a long soft tail you thought was his it was lion’s! Gir’s real governor! *** VĀNARA 2: ROKADIYĀ HANUMĀNA Pliable gods and pavitra every fifty steps a new Hanumāna new avatāra new energy new darkness of the Bhairava! Rokadiyā Hanumāna is unlike the Lambe yet like all his creed with sindoor and oil that eats devotees’ coins stuck on the body, the rokdā you said mythifying the money you never earned! Rishi Girirāj inhabits many a divine vānara with heads small, eyes big wide opened or not belly flat or ballooned, Hanumāna fascinates the mountain with a memory Sahajānand and his discovery of Rokadiyā Dev Hanumāna an embodiment of truth satisfying all desires truthful – Paint any stone vermillion and a Hanumāna is born in search of a truth waiting for the Ushā, her light! *** VĀNARA 3: HANUMĀNA WITH ELEVEN FACES Ekādash-mukhi Hanumāna, words tell you before you count the heads hands and eyes doubling! from a corner as the bell chimes and lamp flickers devouring the dawn appears Lopāmudra, saying – “O! sage born out of the pot, O! ocean of mercy Hanumāna’s yantras and mantras are not new to me you have revealed them to me! Tell me about the armor of the eleven-faced Hanumāna!” Girnar baffles you with vermillion stones all Hanumāna covered with mythologies unmummified Don’t search for meanings here ever smear your body with ash of memories mysteries you search for are malapropisms! *** Junāgadh, 8 February 2016 ______________ Amrit Gangar is a Mumbai-based writer, curator, film theorist and historian. He writes both in English and Gujarati languages. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Cataloging from the Kitchen: The Luminous World of Arun Ghosh

Sarmistha Dutta Gupta _____________________ Arun Ghosh (1933-2015), phenomenal librarian and archivist who guided many humanities and social science researchers of Kolkata for over four decades, passed away last February unsung in death as in life. Arun-babu, as he was widely known, was the founder librarian of Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (Kolkata). Late in life he also built from scratch the Bhabani Sen Library of rare communist periodicals and books in Bhupesh Bhavan, the headquarters of the CPI in the city. The Moments of Bengal Partition : Selections from the Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1947 – 48 is the outcome of Arun-babu’s meticulous research and offers a selection of news and editorial articles from the Amrita Bazar Patrika, the leading ‘nationalist’ daily of the time, in the months immediately before the Partition and after. Towards the end of his life, Arun-babu was engaged in another significant compilation as he was editing a dictionary of Bengali terms associated with books, reading and library usage. In remembering Arun Ghosh a year after his passing, I offer excerpts from a long interview with him that I did in 2012 for the golden jubilee archive of IIMC, Joka (reproduced with permission). Arun-babu had also served IIMC as a young librarian in its initial years. In the interview he came across as a great raconteur with an inexhaustible stock of anecdotes. These excerpts largely trace the extraordinary journey of a young man growing up in Calcutta in a refugee family in the late-40s and early 50s, who began as a worker at the Ichhapur Gun and Shell Factory, spent a few years working at the office of the Providend Fund Commissioner—spending much time browsing and reading on his own all this while—and finally chose to be a librarian for his love of books. On his childhood and growing up, Independence and Partition I was born on 24 July 1933 in a village in Barisal in East Bengal [now Bangladesh]. My father used to work in Kolkata, and we came away here. I distinctly remember that when I got admitted to school at the age of 5 or 6, my father had rented a house in Agarpara. This would be around 1939 or 1940. There was no school in Agarpara then. So I would have to commute by train daily to the nearest school. Now for a child of that age, commuting by train posed certain dangers. At this point my grandfather, who was a teacher in a school in Ulpur in Faridpur district of east Bengal, wrote to my father, saying, if you send the boy to me, he can stay here and study in my school. So at age 7 I was admitted to class III in that school. When I was in class IX my grandfather was taken seriously ill. My maternal uncles brought him to Calcutta and I accompanied them and began living with my grandfather in a rented house in Dakshineshwar. That was 1946. Partition came within a year. I was admitted to a school here in 1947 in class IX. On Independence Day I heard that one could travel free in buses coming to Kolkata, and that they would take you to Fort William. Along with a few of my classmates I came to Kolkata and took the tour. I remember it distinctly. But the euphoria vanished within a year. In 1948 when Gandhiji was assassinated, I was thinking a bit differently, perhaps I was getting to be politically aware. I remember, when the news came to Dakshineshwar I fasted the whole day. Maybe I had thought that bereavement could also be expressed through fasting. This reaction was very spontaneous. Another memory that haunts me to this day is the memory of refugees coming from East Pakistan in hordes, including several of my very close relations. They were gathering in the vicinity of our house, and looking for places for shelter. I was seeing all this. And then gradually I lost the feeling of joy that I had about Independence just a year ago. I was seeing my own close relations suffer. I was seeing refugee life in Sealdah station. It was terrible. I was reacting to all this happening around me and I could no longer concentrate on my studies. I somehow took my Matriculation in 1949, and just managed to scrape through. My younger brother and sisters were all in school. Some of my close relations from our native place were staying with us in that small one-roomed house, some were shacking up in the verandah, and some were putting up in accommodations in the locality. My father just had his small income to support all of them. I initially got admitted to a college for my Intermediate. It used be IA then. We had moved to Sodepur during this time. My father told me, ‘I won’t be able to afford your IA expenses. You’ll have to buy books, commute from Sodepur to the college. Since you are a Matriculate now, why don’t you look for a job? I’ll try to look around too.’ I was only 16 years old then. I had to quit college and look for a job. Highly qualified individuals from east Bengal were also looking for jobs, and they were taking up any job that came their way. They were even taking up jobs of labourers, or some small odd jobs in shops, or even working as domestic help in rich families, so that shelter and food would be provided for. Checking gun parts for a living and studying at night Anyway, I registered my name in the Barrackpore Employment Exchange. I was called for a job interview of a ‘Viewer’ at the Ichhapur Gun and Shell Factory. The job title was rather showy, but my job was to measure the separate components of the rifle to check whether they were of the correct size. So I was basically ‘viewing’ whether the shapes and sizes of the gun parts were okay or