The Equitable Force of Destitution
HUG reviews: Nund Rishi: Poetry and Politics in Medieval Kashmir by Abir Bazaz. Cambridge University Press, 2023 What happens to the one who has drunk the nectar and found taste in wild vegetables? The same one is seized by the leopard that is death in life itself. And in solitude such a being can hear the rumblings of a day when the sky shall melt like molten copper and mountains look like fluffs of wool. Abir Bazaz has crafted a tapestry of patient, utopian and life affirming possibilities by explicating the inner workings of affirmative negation that is non-dual gnosis; in this particular case, that of sahaja Islam, as felt and realized in the many utterances (especially through the shruk—a quatrain that expresses a single thought) of Nund Rishi (1378-1440)—Kashmir’s most revered saint-poet and founder of the Rishi Order. Once he has given us a sense of what might be the contours of the sahaja vath (path) in Kashmir and what its similarities and differences are with other such traditions on the subcontinent and in wider South Asia, Bazaz delves deep into three intimate ideas and their relationship with each other in shaping such a sahaja world: the trope of ‘death before dying,’ the unity of negation-affirmation, and the apocalypse of the ‘afterworld’ which is also immediate and political. Love is taking a Beehive into your Coat What is syncretic in gnosis is also esoteric. The fragrant secret of the subtle knot is not to be divulged always in ecstasy. One of the finely-drawn threads in this work depicts how Nund Rishi was carefully trying to finding a way through the Shari’ah (from shara-road) and more ecstatic Sufi utterances (shath). It is not easy to place him. Indeed, for Nund Rishi, Shari’ah is the sahaja path. It is a bank to the river of human action. What is important is creating the common conditions of self transformation. The transformation is at once within selves, and also a possibility open to common humanity if it can realize the workings of such gnosis. All charlatanry in teaching and accepting knowledge must be abandoned if one has to enter such a zone of transformation. One cannot pretend to be an elder in the exchange of knowledge—Bazaz introduces a sense of radical equity right there. Decoding the hermeneutics of the shruks is not only about the pyrotechnics of kalam. The authentic faqih (jurist) and alim(scholar) must invoke the idea of amal (action) and other practices of the self. The book is about achieving a difficult sobriety. Bazaz tells us about the ecstatic utterances and martyrdom of the Sufi saint poet— Mansur al-Hallaj. He was maimed, quartered and stoned to death. Hallaj’s divine realization is beyond doubt but his error was in divulging the inner truths of gnosis, and the fragrance of unity was thus dissipated. He could not “bear the blow of the divine flash” and got “his windpipe shattered.” Nund Rishi, by contrast to such an ecstatic Sufism, seeks a more “simple, navigable path.” The ‘way of going” is rather a patient and difficult talk, he suggests—a commitment to a universalism that has to be earned from the pain that is love and total abandonment. Only the one who is cast out turns into a sahajia. At this point Bazaz tries to tackle one of the unresolvable but productive dilemmas of such gnosis: after such knowledge, does the vath lead to a supraconscious state of void (sunyata) or to a total immersion in life’s flow and trans-religious variegatedness? At times Bazaz (with cues from the likes of Rahman Rahi) seems to suggest that the latter was the path of Lal Ded (and is she therefore more poetic?) rather than Nund Rishi. The former is sweet and ecstatic, the other, serious and heavy. But more often than not in the book, the two of them are placed as carrying forward the same tradition. Shops after Closing Time Death is a stealthy thief: “that which leaves nothing intact.” The shruks are aporetic knots. These are ‘touchstones’ that are often paradoxical and therefore cannot be reduced to a belief-system. Feeling the power of each shruk is a mode of living, a process of transformation. They burn down the ego. One realizes that the night is dark, and death, imminent—for death has “shattered our youth”—“the way water is absorbed by new clay channels/the way shops are abandoned at closing time.” One waits in the abandoned bazaar—for ruination and complete desolation. Since death is universal, no one will be cured without dying. Death is a sense of the passage of time, and preparing for death is such a realization. A powerful shruk tells us about the intimidating quarters of the rich, who shoo poor people away. Beautiful women singing in the palaces, until “dust is being swept with chowries,” and “people grow cotton over there.” Time elapses. It leaves its mark. Ruination is equity. Hence, death before dying is freedom—since to live in such a cataclysmic condition of the outcast leaves nothing intact. But in the process, the ruined one gains a second life in eternity: which is a process of kenotic self-emptying. Dying before death joins us to one another. The political question of fraternity is passed through the bridge of equality. This is the power of living in death—in transforming individual and common living. Show me Your Face in the Clay La Makan (no place) is the address of the outcast. Solitude is a form of preparation. Slow ruination gradually leads to no-place or nothingness. Ruination is therefore an invitation to poetry—which celebrates the temporal movement in and through life. The bereft is bound to all creatures and to every substance around him—“abandoning existence, I found presence/Thus have I reached the place-less place.” In this section on place-less place in the Rishi tradition, Bazaz deals most intricately and intimately with the question of what is affirming in negative theology—about the relationship between nafi and isbat (a discussion he had already initiated in the introductory pages
A Century Shimmers like a Star-studded Sky
[Amitabh: Samastipur aur anya Kavitaen. New Delhi:Nibandh, 2023] Prasanta Chakravarty The tightrope of real intimacy means trying to cultivate our common capabilities—for life is unembellished, plane and full of unexpected miracles; even in barbarous times: जीवन सपाट सीधा और सरल है | Especially in such times as ours: since all veneer stands exposed. It is the hardest of tasks—to shore easy and unadorned intimacy; walking step by little step with the times, and yet trying to leap across its narrow precincts, with a heart that is too large to accept pettiness, too devastated and restive to remain calm and poised. As the imaginative, mutinous soul brings the full force of intimacy to the reader, it runs the risk of self-exposure. Exposing the self is the obverse of self-indulgent confession. A prophetic minstrel does not skirt time; he confronts it. That is the only way to reveal, and remind, a bewildered humanity of the live and mobile collective forces that throb around us. We refuse to acknowledge, and participate in, acts of common humanity. So the poet hammers home the humble and forgotten origins of life-force again and again in order to shine light on its wondrous interiors. The poet reminds us that only by losing respectability can one rid oneself of the savage desire to remain relevant for the sake of mere convenience. So, at the very basic level a series of motifs and situations in Amitabh’s maiden anthology concerns not the hypocrisy in our lives, but the apathy that comes from craving good living at any cost. Not apathy, but the frivolity of such an existence. Not frivolity, but a craftiness that is at once cruel and petulant—a devastating cocktail unleashed in public life and personal relationships. With razor sharp irony, he brings forth the smallness of our desires: the kiss turns into a subject of debate (मैंने चुम्बन पर बहस का एक बोल्ड प्रस्ताव दिया), a high-end god with cigarettes on his lips hold-forth in his make-belief paradise(एक देवता का चेहरा याद है मुझे/वे बंगाली थे/ उनकी सिगरेट कभी नहीं बुझती थी), vulture like care-givers wax eloquent over dead workmen (तुम्हारे मृत चहरे में चमक ढूंढ रहे थे), banal celebrations are rife (खुद को ख़तरे से बहार पा रहे सभी खुशनसीब देशवासियों/तुम्हे बहुत बहुत जन्मदिन मुबारक), deep thought is summoned only to call out and cancel others (ख़ारिज करना आसान काम नहीं है/लोगों को ख़ारिज करने से पहले लोग/ गरम समोसे और ठंडी मिठाई मंगवाकर रखते है)| Indeed, as Amitabh imagines, we are not happy with one big sun that has been apportioned for us; we live by little suns of avarice and envy instead (हर मौके के लायक जेब में एकाध सूरज हम रख कर चलें). This phenomenon has percolated even among those who do value other, simpler modes of happiness (मोटा पैसा फिर भी दिन रात उनका पीछा करता है). Hence, we make sure that our children are kept away from every trace of violence that besets the world, and we keep them away from poetry. Having been fed some rancid fodder, like pigs we prefer to die every hour: (सूअर पालना असंभव हो गया है /सिर्फ मल खाकर मर रहे हैं सूअर). The shepherds—the wise-ones, have deserted us. How do we now relate to our surroundings? We physically live in our mohallas, but our heart and soul lie elsewhere—in some glossy, superior universe: hence the disjunction with our own world. The guilt of this inner desertion has to be either sublimated or disowned tout court, at once with exuberance and cynicism. We are well aware of the nature of the battle-lines, but we refrain from taking sides, hoping to save our little havens. But living actually does not matter to those who wish to save their own skin. No life is sacrosanct, no death disturbs anymore: इनमे से किसी की भी जान की/तुम्हारे लिए कोई क़ीमत नहीं है/ तुम यह नहीं कहते/तुम बचे हुए हो क्योंकि ये मर सकते हैं/एक दूसरे को मार सकते हैं/ तुम ये नहीं कहते | Sediments of Habit Amitabh is mutinous and ironic, but never a cynic. The poems try to understand the psychology of our times—what beats beneath such apathy? Why such colossal waste? The lynch mob comprises of actual human beings—with sentiments and affections. But do they babble within, unable to communicate or channelize their anger? Do we consider ourselves righteous and beyond smallness? Are we not all vulnerable within: Like the tall palm tree, which stands all powerful and self-contained during day, only to reveal itself as lifeless shadow after dusk? Are long nights necessary from time to time in order to remove distances that separate us? The poet is worried about those who remain for counting the dead, those who die million deaths before dying. Cannibalism breeds in our minds: सारे आदमखोर दिमाग में लड़ते हैं | The metaphor of our times is indoor cricket for the poet—the din is so deafening that the game itself becomes secondary. How has the noise of such communal feelings and homogeneity of hurt identities penetrated our kitchens, classrooms and media desks? Amitabh undercuts constantly the apparently serious business of difference among humans, the superfluity of adult-transactions and arbitrations. We all know that pistols are merely make-belief toys among brothers from childhood—how can they turn against each other? Have we confused toys for real killing machines? Violence lies just on the other side of attachment. Lynching, when the moment comes for one, arrives in the midst of everydayness (जब तुम हमारी जान लेने घर में दाखिल होवोगे /हम तुम्हे खली चौकी पर चिंतामग्न पड़े हुए मिलेंगे) | There is nothing dramatic about dying—it is as unadorned and simple as living because there is no possibility of personal mourning anymore (हालांकि की में जानता हूँ इस क़ातिल समय में/शोक मनाने का ये व्यक्तिगत तरीका कोई तरीका नहीं है). One source of the impasse lies in the fact that all conviction is fractured at this time; there are no clear paths for articulation: मेरे पास कुछ यक़ीन है/वे पक्के नहीं हैं |
The Haunting of the Uprooting: On the Functionality of Revisiting Chinnamul
Aparajita De “Zaam na, zaam na; kisu teyi zaam naa” (“I won’t leave, I won’t; not for anything else, I won’t leave), forty-three minutes into the first film made on the Partition, Chinnamul (The Uprooted, 1950) rings out close to our collective histories of the anguish that many share from Bengal during the Partition of India (1947). Director Nemai Ghosh (not to be mistaken with his namesake, the legendary Ray photographer) uses the nuance of the expert and the poignance of the storyteller of an epoch, much before Garm Hawa (Hot Winds, M S Sathyu, 1974) or much later, in Supriyo Sen’s documentary Way Back Home (2002). The details that Chinnamul captures are hard to ignore in the context of the then and the now. Pivoted on the travails of Srikanta and Laxmi from Naldanga, Dhaka, as the country is overnight divided and entire communities, lands, and identities vanish as if they never were, the film ultimately becomes metonymic of a country in transition, divided against itself. The local greed of Madhu Ganguly and Muzaffar Khan, one signifying an upper-caste Bengali brahmin and the latter a Bengali Muslim, become symbols of a predatory gentry that cashed on people’s helplessness; and acquired homes at throwaway prices to consolidate their hold over agricultural land and ancestral property. Such a motif of greed and dispossession was beyond caste or religion in the homelessness of a Prasanna, Srikanta, or a nameless sharecropper and Muslim neighbor. There is only one intersecting truth here: a community’s displacement is synonymous with others’ prosperity. There is no greater or lesser violence there except for those affected, their irreconcilable loss, and their inability to believe that known worlds were changing overnight into perilously new ones. But the film does not go into the violence and gore of 1947 and its aftermath, the eventful consequences of which we continue to pay over with more blood, tears, dispossession, and division. It pivots instead on the anguish of people unable to fathom homelessness. It is as if the community literally sleepwalks into an inexplicable apocalypse that makes them refugees within a matter of days, making them occupants of shoddy, makeshift colonies hastily formed of once-landed peasants with homes and addresses. In the faded reels of the unpreserved version on YouTube, the Naldanga refugees in Calcutta (now Kolkata) represent a minor group, amongst many during the time, formed consequent to a complacently drawn line symbolic of the Empire’s regular nonchalance in the fate of the millions it displaced and annihilated. Nevertheless, the film’s closing frame alludes to the hopes and aspirations of ‘going back’ of a return to the homeland that is, at once real and existing, and at the same time, vanished and becoming the stuff of myths. In the tenuous grey of that promise of ‘return,’ India too, began–its “tryst with destiny.” While daunting, the aspirations of a people stepping out of the Empire and its shadows were not flawless, and neither charted along a predetermined path. In experimenting and liberally flirting with a different kind of crisis after Partition, there was a special hostage: memory and its recalibration in Partition conversations. In the film, the country is at once a lived reality and an imaginative remnant which beckons the displaced to a ‘return.’ While the trauma of the Partition is not the focal point in Ghosh, in a broader context, an erasure of collective trauma around the Partition became dominant. What became increasingly amplified was the displacement and oppression of a particular group by another group. In narratives of trauma and loss, shared and transmitted, generational stories of displacement and anger, binarization and a competitive calibration of anguish and loss were normalized. In the afterlife of the seven decades following the largest displacement of humankind in modern history, the depiction, narration, and the retelling of the Partition have also become synonymous with a narrative sustaining hate, Islamophobia, and the demonizing of an antagonist, for the glory of a grand motherland, for the idea of Desh (country) cannot exist without an amorphous other. If not for reimagining, the horror of the terrifying other is commingled with a dangerous pandering to the illusion of the single grand enemy. This results in an idea that metaphorically connects us to the title of the film I began with—it uproots us from who we are, the uprooting of our memories we never reconciled with, the local histories of loss and solidarity we never quite highlighted in the bigger, single grand narrative that eclipsed our shared losses, shared traumas, and shared displacements along with the anguish of a generation that faithfully believed we would be the guardians of the dream they delivered us, their idea of India. Unfortunately, the lack of retrospective understanding that there is no comparative paradigm to reflect on who suffered more or less is colossal in its myopia in sustaining erasure and grand delusion. In revisiting the trauma associated with the Partition, one may start to construct aporetic events between what happened and how/who is affected and to what extent we choose to remember and transmit, and what we choose to forget or erase from collective discursive spaces, that stem from collective, and independent private ruminations. In revisiting the single most eventful historical event, spartan language may not be reserved for even the faint-hearted; for, the density of trauma and displacement needs emotive articulation as much as documentary evidence to record it factually. Significantly, a sense of critical reflection and an eternal vigil should be most dear to our essence of belonging. A continual, critical, reflective, comprehensive, and honest conversation around 1947 and its private memory needs to be revived from the elite corridors of history and brought into public discursive spaces. Stories of resilience, rebuilding, support, and solidarity need to be retold with renewed enthusiasm. Our private traumas are rooted in hatred and misunderstandings for so long that it has dangerously simplified our stories into a single one, with a single enemy and a single moral compass. Consequently, the overwhelming burden of totalitarian realities and selective erasure collapses any possibilities of reconciliation and closure. The
“सच्ची कला चक्कर में डालती है”: An Exchange with Shiv Prasad Joshi
The poet and the essayist Shiv Prasad Joshi has recently written an essay in Pahal about the wellsprings of writing (http://pahalpatrika.com/frontcover/getrecord/321), on the question of holding a perspective and on modes of enunciation. In the essay he has placed front and centre certain ways and tendencies by which art can speak to its audience with honesty and purpose, especially in a time that is uncertain and fuzzy. This conversation with him arises out the concerns he expresses in the essay. _________ Dear Shiv-ji, Namaste. It was really nice to converse with you today. Once again, let me tell you how much I enjoyed your most perceptive observations in Pahal, a collage of thoughts with certain very important threads weaved within. Let me begin by commenting on the very title of the essay: कौन किस सतह से बोलता है. The word ‘satah’ immediately will remind your readers of Muktibodh for obvious reasons. But as we read the essay, it seems to me that ‘satah’ is used in dual senses and sometimes they fuse. One, in the sense of a vantage point, or a level; a sense of understanding and comprehending not only our times but also a sense of having courage (“क्योंकि सुखी नालियां बची रह गयी है और सहस सतह पर आकर किसी गेंद की तरह टप्पे खाता रहता है”). So, the position one takes in life and forms perspective is a matter of a keen sense of perception; but it has also to do with courage and forthrightness, to say things that need to be said. The other meaning of ‘satah’ which I got is a powerful sense of the aesthetic ( musical value, rhythmic quality of life and living). Also perhaps to have a sharp awareness of the uncanny, dark, and convoluted things that lurk in our midst? Your initial choices of Kundera, Kafka and Hemingway show that to me. All three are remarkably honest with life and not afraid to relate the aesthetic to the difficult encounters of life. Also, all of them are highly imaginative artists, needless to say. kalpana and vastvikta (yatharth) must be represented as real, as they do in their art. The fusion becomes too real, ‘the underlying real’ for the reader–as you say later. This you also call: रचना का संघर्ष—the struggle of the composition. Am I thinking on the right track? Best, Prasanta *** नमस्ते प्रशांतो जी, मुझे आपके नाम का उच्चारण कैसे करना चाहिए. ये ठीक से समझ नही आ रहा है इसलिए प्लीज़ गुस्ताख़ी माफ़ करिएगा. आपने इस लेख को सराहा. बहुत ध्यान से और बहुत करीने से पढ़ा. मैं इस बात से अभिभूत तो ही हूं और ये मेरे लिए हार्दिक संतोष की बात भी है लेकिन इससे बढ़कर मैं इस बात का कायल हूं कि आपकी रीडिंग कितनी सूक्ष्म और मर्म तक जाने वाली है. गद्य का ऐसा विलक्षण पाठ बहुत कम दिखता है. ख़ैर.. फिलहाल तो दो चार बाते हैं. जो आपके मेल के जवाब में तो नहीं हैं लेकिन इस लेख के पीछे दो चार चीजें हैं- एक सांगीतिक मूल्य, दूसरी एस्थेटिक इन्टेंशन, और तीसरी वेटलेसनेस, भारहीनता और एक और चीज़ है वो है आख़िर रचना क्यों. वहीं से शुरू होती है बात. ये कोई क्रम नहीं है और इनके साथ अन्य राईटिंग मूल्य भी जुड़े हुए हैैं. मैं ये भी बताना चाहता था कि हम अभी बहुत अच्छे पाठक बनने से बहुत दूर हैं. हिंदी के संबंध में ख़ासतौर पर. और पाठक ही नहीं, एक अच्छे दर्शक, श्रोता के रूप में भी हमें विकसित होना चाहिए. हिंदी में देखता हूं कि एक दीवार से दूसरी दीवार तक आना जाना रहता है. हम टकरा रहे हैं, ये भी हमें नहीं दिखता, महसूस तो क्या करेंगे. बेशक अंग्रेजी भाषा के पास हैरी पॉटर का नैरेटिव है लेकिन हिंदी ने तो अपने लिए वो गनीमत भी नहीं बनायी है. मिसाल के लिए हमारे यहां जो सत्यजित राय का रचना संसार है, इतनी विपुल संपदा. संगीत, कथा, सिनेमा, चित्र. वो आज कहां है किसके पास है. और हिंदी इन नायकों के पास जाने से कतराती है. मुक्तिबोध ये कोशिश कर रहे थे, उन्होंने किसी वजह से ही गुरू रवीन्द्र का नाम लिया था. रघुबीर सहाय के पास ऐसी कोशिशें थीं. जो उनके बाद असद ज़ैदी और मंगलेश डबराल में नज़र आयीं. विष्णु खरे, विनोदकुमार शुक्ल और वीरेन डंगवाल के यहां भी वे चीज़ें बेशक देखी जा सकती हैं. आज की चुनिंदा कवयित्रियों और कवियों में भी वे पोएटिक सतहें हैं. असल में कला बहुत नीचे बैठी रहती है. न दिखना और धूमिल रह जाना उसका एक ख़ास लक्षण रहा है. ये एक ऐसी सतह है जो मैं समझना चाहता हूं. सच्ची आवाज़ें वहीं से आती हैं. लेकिन वे कितनी कम है प्रशांतो जी. और कितनी दूर से आती हुई…धुंधली सी…! हो सकता है ये बातें आगे पुनर्विचार की मांग भी करें. फिलहाल मैं अभी इस पर इतना ही कहूंगा और अगले कुछ रोज़ में आपको थोड़ा और विस्तार से लिखने की कोशिश करूंगा. थैंक्स. अपना ख़्याल रखिएगा. सादर शिव *** Dear Shiv-ji, Prashanto, as you say, is fine. So, do not worry about it. Thank you for the links and the updated version of your essay. I am reading all of them with interest. Thanks also for illuminating the latent and underlying sources from which the concerns about art and politics arise. I could see one of your prime concerns is to address the fundamental issue about the act of writing itself; the urge to record and create. From your previous response, the nature of the quest becomes even clearer. I would like to know more about the term ‘weightlessness’ though in the context of the quest. This sense of restiveness binds the two of us. The inability to fathom the cacophony that surrounds us and these blurry and often clever moves by our interlocutors disturb us. This relentless urge to remain relevant, the fear of being forgotten that marks our time cannot be explained in terms of mere self -consciousness and acute narcissism. Its corrosive power eats the soul. It destroys all relationalities by constantly disguising the sources of our own selves–what you call धूमिल रह जाना. Are we also not implicated in ushering