Between Desire and Disability: Karichan Kunju’s Pasittamanidam (Hungry Humanity)
Kiran Keshavamurthy ————————————– Introduction The significance of the literary lies in its ability to imagine the inner workings of the human subject. The imagination of the human mind or body can never be notwithstanding the realist claims of a literary text, an accurate reflection of life itself. There has to be in any serious work of literature, an attempt to aestheticize the human relationship to the world at large, which may not be a reflection of what people actually feel or should feel. If the function of literature is to simulate without entirely corresponding to a certain reality, it would follow that literary meaning, or more specifically, the truth-claims of literature, lie in the domain of the possible and the probable. I wish to understand literature as a codified form that complicates and potentially transforms lived realities by imagining other possibilities. The role of any form of intellectual production may expand the notion of the social, which is always a construction constituted by exclusions. One of the functions of certain serious works of literature,for instance, have revealed the ambiguities that both constitute and alter visions of social justice. The question of moral ambiguity becomes all the more fraught when it comes to literary texts, where the line between representing and perpetuating social injustice cannot always be clearly drawn. This is not to condone texts that contribute to existing stereotypes and prejudices, but to evaluate the work of imagination within the diegetic world of the text and the social world to which the text responds.There have been many instances in the recent history of Indian literature where texts have been censored and banned for allegedly hurting the sentiments of religious or caste groups. These campaigns to censor literary texts have been motivated by dominant political interests without even reading the texts concerned. There has been a selective focus on the “offensive portions” of the texts and even the state has abstained from creating an intellectual space where there could be a deliberation over notions of offense and obscenity. These controversial texts have been significant in revealing the contradictions that undermine dominant or even competing notions of morality and ethics. Examples abound from Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to a series of Tamil texts that were recently censored from Pudumaippittan’s short stories to Perumal Murugan’s novel One-Part Woman. But there could also be another way of reading moral ambiguity, which could form a formal element of the narrative.The following text for instance, creates a tension between the narrator’s sympathy for an ‘innocent’ character who ends up transgressing social and sexual norms and the character’s guilt that reflects or anticipates moral criticism. Here the literary text dramatizes the upholding and subversion of social norms to complicate the notion of what it means to be moral or ethical. This essay is a study of disability and sexuality in a novel by the Tamil writer, D Narayanasami (1919-1992) or Karichan Kunju as he was popularly known. In my larger book project, I located this writer in a modern literary lineage of writers mostly from the Tanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, writing primarily from the 1930s to the 1970s and 80s. Like his contemporaries, Karichan Kunju represented the life of the Brahmin man as an imagined conflict between sexuality and religiosity. Here the term religiosity may not refer to any specific form of brahminism and is often conflated with spirituality or advaita as something that characterizes the metaphysical identity between atman and brahman. Kunju’s protagonists are apparently divided by their illicit sexuality and their religious and spiritual impulse to transcend desire and the body. But what complicates a conventional opposition between sexuality and Hindu male asceticism, is firstly, the interpenetration of the religious, the spiritual and the sexual, secondly, the coincidence of the sexual and the religious in disease and disability and thirdly, the presence of protagonists who try to practice abstinence without being able to altogether renounce worldly life. These protagonists experience disability both as a religious experience of sexual redemption and as a self-affirmative and,what I call, an empathetic mode of sensuality. To be precise, the experience of shame and suffering is a transformative and empowering one that compels the protagonist to empathize and literally reach out to other outcastes, often through touch. What is posited as an untenable contradiction between the religious and the erotic reveals, I argue, a more fundamental disjuncture between the mind and the body. If dominant masculinity has been typically associated with strength and moral self-restraint, the male protagonist in the following text represents a crisis in masculinity with his lack of sexual restraint and capacity; a crisis that is in retrospect constituted by disease and disability. His moral interpretation of disability is also limited, or contradicted, by the fact that the disabled male body is a field of sexual and ethical possibilities that potentially overcomes the ontological disparity between body and mind and self and other. The modern figure who loomed large in the religious imagination of this generation of Tamil writers was Mohandas Gandhi. His growing popularity from the 1920s and 1930s inspired the writings of many self-styled Gandhian writers in Tamil and other Indian languages. Gandhi’s ideals of non-violent resistance, spiritual abstinence and social reform were widely and even loosely fictionalized by some early Tamil women writers (particularly VM Kodainayagiammal and the early Rajam Krishnan), who could for the first time imagine women sharing public spaces with men while protesting against foreign cloth and liquor. So even if there was not a direct allusion to Gandhi or his mass-movement, the Gandhian reformist spirit, as it were, pervaded a plethora of characters. While some of these female writers produced characters who protested against male alcoholism and domestic violence, their male counterparts created pious and restrained male characters whose conflicts with sexuality resemble even if somewhat crudely, a Gandhian model of abstinent masculinity. The protagonist of today’s discussion is another instance of a man whose attempts to redeem his sexuality by rechannelizing his desire in altruism represents, I argue,
Why “HokKolorob”?
Subhasish Ray ——————————— When students from Jadavpur University and their allies in other colleges and universities in West Bengal protested in large numbers last year, against what they correctly interpreted as the University administration’s callous mishandling of a sexual harassment incident, they were honoring a rich tradition of students in Indian campuses utilizing their democratic rights to hold government-backed administrations accountable for abuses of power. However, there was one critical aspect of these protests that also imbued them with a very different meaning. This was encapsulated in the choice of the core slogan used by the protesters: “HokKolorob.” Exploring this peculiar choice gives us a glimpse into the changing nature of anti-establishment student politics in West Bengal, and perhaps in the rest of India. Political protests have always been deeply embedded in everyday campus life in India. Part of the reason for this is, of course, something that was also peculiar to student politics in India: the integral links between students’ organizations and political parties. Those links, at least in the late 1990s and early 2000s, were extremely thick, and so, unsurprisingly, students could be easily mobilized, whether willingly or unwillingly, into anti-establishment politics especially by the left wing student groups. The hold of the organized Left on these groups, however, also implied that the vocabulary of political slogans and songs that were used in student protests were borrowed willy-nilly from people’s movements elsewhere in India. Looking back, anyone who had passed through Indian campuses during that time would recall Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) songs being played on election nights accompanied by a rhythmic, but monotonous, dafli, with students taking turns at the instrument. Pete Seeger’s songs were also perennial favorites and so was the early Dylan. It is instructive to note that around the same time, the likes of Suman Chattopadhyay and Pratul Mukhopadhyay, were shaking up campuses in West Bengal, providing a refreshing counterpoint to decades of hegemonic rule by the Left Front. Songs like “Haal cherona bondhu” or “Dinga Bhasao Saagore Saathire” were staples of the day. In retrospect, there are two aspects of the protest music of that period that stand out. First, the lyrics, with varying degrees of nuance, carried a clear political message. The goal of this music was not to achieve aesthetic beauty, but to be an instrument for political change. Second, and in sync with the first point, the musical element in the compositions was pared down to the minimum. Nothing epitomized this more than the sight of Suman Chattopadhyay on stage. Shorn off any musical accompaniments, other than a classical guitar slung on his shoulder, a harmonica mounted over his face, and a keyboard in tow, Suman would engage in what is best described as a one-man political theater. It was clear to anyone watching carefully that the musical elements of the compositions he “enacted” were simply embellishments to propel the performance, not standouts on their own. In an important piece, Sumangala Damodaran traces such performances to the “collective song” tradition within IPTA’s repertoire.[1] This was the tradition, Damodaran argues, that was carried forward from the 1940s and 1960s, when a series of musical experiments were conducted under the fledgling IPTA banner, and gradually became hegemonic over time. What distinguished this tradition from the other traditions that fell by the wayside was its emphasis on the content of the music instead of the form and grammar that were considered to be superfluous to the political agenda. None of this, propaganda or political theater, however, would have sufficed for Jadavpur. To understand why this is the case leads us to the realm of the sociological. There has been, to put it mildly, a sea change in the mode of political socialization of the generation that currently populates India’s colleges and university campuses compared to earlier generations. There are two main drivers of this new mode of socialization. First, the present generation has come of age, politically speaking, without a permanently mobilized Left to back them. They have witnessed, first hand, how the Left Front degenerated into a rump political force. They have also witnessed, first hand, how the political party that promised to bring “poriborton” is reproducing the moribund political institutions of the ancien regime in a new garb. Simply put, unlike previous generations, the current one cannot rely on a readily available party-political framework to frame its political subjectivity. Second, as clichéd as it may sound, the present generation is truly the first post-independence generation to be schooled by social media. What this effectively means is that their political selves have been forged, not within the ambit of ideological certitudes, but in that extraordinary mélange of, sometimes very contrary, ideas and influences, which is the global public sphere. Lest it seem as if these observations are merely caricatures of a small segment of the youth of West Bengal, and unrepresentative of the youth of West Bengal as a whole, the reader would do well to refer to the pioneering surveys conducted by scholars at the Center for the Study of Social Sciences in Kolkata, which demonstrate clearly that a very similar impulse, albeit with important differences, is at work in shaping the political outlook of the rural youth of West Bengal. In interview after interview, young men and women, asserted their desire to move out of agriculture, to become something other than the “subjects” of anti-poverty programs, and to be embedded in the same global networks of citizenship that were so easily accessible to their urban counterparts. But, what do these momentous developments add up to, in a conceptual sense? In many ways, they amount to a wholesale repudiation of the party-political framework as the central mode of conducting politics in India’s campuses. They reflect a newfound confidence among university and college students to take up political agendas without the stewardship of the organized left. At another level, and perhaps more importantly, it also signals the rise of what can best be described as politics in the defense
Then Will Come Envy
Viren Dangwal [Translations: Ashok Pande] Defining the poet of our times, Nazim Hikmet once remarked: “The real poet is not engaged in his love, his happiness or pain. In such poet’s poems his people’s pulse must beat … The poet, in order to be successful, should, in his poems, shed light on the material life. One who escapes from real life and thus treats of unrelated subjects, is destined to burn like straw.” Probably the most innovative and the most daring among his contemporaries, Viren Dangwal treats the ordinary world with intense objectivity and skillfulness. He has turned the most mundane things like cows, elephants, tables, papayas, flies etc. into themes for his unique form of poetry. Attempting this requires immense compassion and audacity. Critics and poets alike have time and again emphasized that Viren has ardently followed the tradition of great Hindi poets Nirala and Nagarjun. Part of this is true, but what makes Viren Dangwal a unique poet is his modernity and awareness. His socio-political convictions were vociferous and underline his unassuming loyalty to common people. Constantly challenging the evils of the new world order, he dares to experiment with hitherto unknown forms and themes, constantly making us aware of the threats and vulnerability that we are exposed to. His poetry encompasses love, hope, struggle, irony and above all life – life that is simultaneously trivial and enormously full of possibilities. Summing up his vision, he observes: Down these very roads tyrants have kept coming Down these same roads One day Our people will come too. (From the Preface of ‘Its been Long since I Found Anything’ – Translation of Viren Dangwal’s poems. Published by Adharshila Prakashan, 2005) ________________________________ P.T. Usha Dark youthful gazelle Flies on her swift long legs Daughter of my impoverished country Still alive in the brightness of her eyes is the modesty recognizing hunger Therefore there is no Sunil Gavaskarsque splendor on her face Don’t ever sit P. T. Usha in that Maruti car you received as prize Giving yourself airs even in your thoughts Rather, put your feet up on the seat when you travel in the airplane Does your mouth make sounds while eating? No worries Those who regard silent jaws as civilized are the most dangerous gluttons in the world. *** Allahabad : 1970 1. I carry you along As the water carries the bank along A roguery, a nostalgia, a mischief, A panic, a suffering, a turn around, a crumpled hat, A hard kick on the bum, Scratching of a closing door with the wretchedness of paws Life is a strange riddle As soon as one thinks one belongs And spreads out the towel, ready to breathe easily One is thrown out mandatorily. 2. Scores of girders come crashing down Under them there is a man still alive His pupils are turned upwards From the corners of his lips a line of blood trickles But he is still alive, that man. His sleep is a chariot To take him to the dream that glimmers A thousand light years away 3. Groping in the dark for a matchbox Fingers find The unfamiliar feel Of well known things Knowing full well that I should have I still didn’t fill the stove Last evening Go, lethargy Stay, love Get, job Wife, be Make some khichri and chutney Loneliness Don’t stick to my neck On the crumpled pillow Like the sweat of May. 4. One personal gloom Two sandals getting worn out Three dogs barking So passed even this too, this day How wonderful would it be On opening the door to see Four or five letters Lighting up the darkness 5. I read it from the very beginning There were so many mistakes It was impossible to amend them Life was a book printed in a cheap press So many prescriptions for health They had themselves become disease. 6. A poet is fortunate to be read Just as to be eaten is the good fortune of a guava Yes, it tastes good and is healthy too Maybe, something else would flash in the mind As someone else lives in some other place. 7. Slowly, after the taste of failure fades away Envy would come. You will remember fixing The strap that keeps slipping off Of your rubber chappals You will not remember the sharp Taste of a firm guava The glittering sharpness will terrify the depressed Heart Goodness will taste bitter Shame will not leave the heart Those companions will meet like half-acquaintances With whom one learnt the lessons of life With success will vanish The sorrow of losing, the bliss of finding Then will come envy Blowing the trumpet of greed 8. The sorrow of passion, adolescence Pennilessness, a dosa a luxury In the coffeehouse some petty men Some supermen Two Che Guevaras The human being with me was Ramendra He had Four and a half Rupees 9 [Gaffar] A talkative smile on the face Like a xylophone the catechu-pot All this comes only with experience The shirt will always be sparkling too-blued white The knees will ache of course If you have to sit for sixteen hours in this tiny place “Now it is not like the old days, Sahib, Now every Tom, Dick and Harry Comes to study in the university,” In this contempt is hidden A unique brand of flattery All this comes only with experience. “My own son, Ekram at any rate Never got beyond the sixth grade” This much is certain that Gaffar Never was insulted by any student leader But neither did he ever Give anything on credit to a feeble customer. *** Manner Yellow tinged verdant Leaves have come up. Abundant. Glittering. Trees have Just this one way To tell They too love the world. *** Shamsher The night is my
Infernal Encounters: Streets and Interpretation in Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta Trilogy
Somak Mukherjee In the middle of 1971, when the city of Calcutta according to official figures were witnessing about 200 political killings a month, Mrinal Sen released Interview in some of the prominent movie theatres in Calcutta for commercial viewing, the most prominent of all: Globe, where it ran for three weeks. There was a private screening exclusively for the press before this, where the response was rather subdued, although some critics were quite intrigued by the novelty of the subject matter and the constant interplay between fact and fiction with a surrealistic treatment of the narrative. Public response, however, was overwhelmingly good. Sen claims in his biography that the admiring audience enthusiastically chased the cinematographer K K Mahajan, who was mobbed and subsequently rescued after begging for help in horror[i]. The film ran successfully for two weeks at Globe, one of the most prominent movie theatres in town. After the third week, with the waning enthusiasm, it was withdrawn. The public opinion too was polarized. Some praised the treatment and cinematography, but it received criticism from some quarters as well for being an “anti-social” film. The story, written by Ashish Burman, centred around a young unemployed man called Ranju and his futile attempts to seek a proper suit for an important job interview in a prestigious British company. Ranju, who comes from a lower middle class family with a widowed mother and a sister already has strong recommendation from a friend of his late father. His prospects of getting the job look very bright in the beginning but it goes downhill from there. When Ranju goes to the laundry shop to collect his prized suit (the only one he has) he finds the shop is shut due to a laundry workers’ indefinite strike. He manages to get another suit but even that one gets stolen on the bus. Finally, desperate Ranju goes appears in front of the stunned interview board ( The scene was shot in the IBM office in Calcutta, the American corporate giant had a vibrant marketing presence in the city even then. The interview board members played themselves, asking questions) wearing dhoti and kurta. In a quirky reference Ray’s classic Pratidwandi (The Adversary) here too a board member asks the protagonist “What is the biggest event of the decade?”. While Siddhartha’s serious and ideologically charged reply in Pratidwandi was “The Vietnam War”, here Ranju answers with a sheepish yet sincere smile “My interview, Sir!”. Ranju did not get the job. But this essay is not an exploration of individual anxieties and their transition into reckless abandon. Rather, I will try to concentrate on the spaces that Sen explores with K. K. Mahajan’s handheld camera roaming in the street of Calcutta inside public vehicles or through narrow lanes with garbage heaped on the side. Our first proper introduction with the protagonist too happens on the street:on a tramcar, to be precise. Tram was Calcutta’s most iconic and identifiable public transport during this era. The introduction was something revolutionary in Indian cinema, both formalistically and narrative wise: combining elements of Brechtian alienation, Cinema Verite style and effortless breaking of the fourth wall by the hero. This is what happens: Clip 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLD2zts6BIs We see that while the protagonist stands in the tram, the camera zooms on a magazine a female passenger is reading, and it displays a photo of Mullick himself. The young passenger recognizes Ranjit, annoying a fellow male passenger. Mullick comes forward, looks directly at the camera and says with a shy smile: “It is all my fault. You must be curious, so let me confess. It is indeed my photo. But I am not a star. By any means. My name is Ranjit Mullick, I live in Bhawanipur, and work for a weekly magazine. I go to the press, correct the proof and do other tasks. I have a very uneventful life, you know? Yet that is precisely what attracted Mrinal Sen..yes, yes, the filmmaker, you know? He said, ‘My camera will just chase right through the day’. (The camera shows Mahajan shooting the scene on the tram). I am not supposed to do anything special. I just have to be myself. I told Mrinal Sen that today is going to be something special. Today I have a chance to get a much better job. He said ‘fine!That would be really dramatic!” Just see how he is chasing me! To make profit exploiting my experience, of course!” After Ranju gets down from the tram the male passenger who was irritated moments ago, exclaims with genuine bemusement “You call it cinema? But it is my story—your story!”, but suddenly this celebration of everydayness is disrupted by sequences of street protests and demonstrations, many of them newsreel footages underscoring Sen’s ideological leaning towards documentary realism in his work. Deepankar Mukhopadhyay in his admirably well researched biography of Sen writes, “ Ranjit’s statement before the camera is the first example of Brechtian alienation in Indian cinema. But Sen has always insisted that he has never been influenced by Brecht, the only modern European dramatist who cast a deep impression on him happened to be Peter Weiss. What stands out in Interview is Sen’s attempt to contrast reality and surrealism”[ii] Now, apart from the obvious metavisual significance what I find most intriguing is not what or how of the action but rather, where it happens. Sen has a lifelong enchantment for a comment by Elio Vitorini, one of the foremost creative Marxists in Europe: The point is not to pocket the truth, but to chase the truth. This seemingly enigmatic statement, I feel, sums up one of the central paradoxes of the contingency of image: that is to say, what counts as an authentic interpretation of experience is often that depiction which is considered to be least vulnerable to the tests of subjectivity. Space and spatial dimension has the revelatory potential of stripping that safe interpretation off and opening it up to the possibilities