Patronage, Learning, Innovation
Prasanta Chakravarty The career of poet Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) is a powerful instance of how a poet might succeed through patronage, quite independent of his considerable talent. After his education at Oxford, he was taken up by Sir Edward Dymoke, the Queen’s Champion, which led his establishing a connection with Sir Edward Stafford, the English ambassador in Paris in the 1580s. With Strafford he went to Italy and upon his return, now enthusiastic to write poetry, Daniel soon came to the notice of Mary, Countess of Pembroke. She was enthusiastic about his European experience and offered him financial support, banking on his concern for the condition of the English letters. Of course, educated Englishmen and women of eminent families had appreciated by then that talented men of letters should be championed and rallied as a matter of patriotic pride. In the year 1600, Daniel made a gainful move into the household of Lady Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland where he tutored her daughter. Circa 1604/5 he added the patronage of the rich Earl of Hertford to his portfolio. By this time literate aristocrats were vying for an allocation in the works of Samuel Daniel. He acquired a house in the City of London, became a Groom of the Queen’s Privy Chamber sometime in 1607, advancing to Gentleman Extraordinary in 1613 with a salary of £64, and remained in her household until the Queen’s death in 1619. Daniel, of course, kept lines of communication open to old patrons, dedicating Musophilus to Sir Fulke Greville in 1611, for example. His attentive patrons continued to care for him even after death: Lady Anne Clifford fashioned a memorial inscription for him and paid for his monument in the parish church. The immediate trigger for this lengthy preamble is the Man Booker long-list and the rather predictable unfolding of a network, which pushes and lobbies the case for an author of Indian origin. The mode is kosher. In fact, such care and diplomacy is part and parcel of our existence. There is indeed not much ground to speak from any righteous vantage point—for all of us, surely, must operate within certain finite circles and regardless of our finest professional attitude, we reserve our liking and disliking for this ideology or that style. Yes, the give-and-take in circles of patronage is a subtle art. You play by the rules, and if possible, play with certain élan and nonchalance. But the nature of creating networks and working within a coterie culture also means that you fully appreciate the rules of that particular culture or faction, as the case may be. To understand the inner workings of a faction is an art in successful communication and speech-act exchange. In India, a section of the highly feudal parliamentarian left has been the most scientific practitioners of the art of patronage. Fellow travellers have been richly and routinely rewarded from time to time. In Bengal, one has seen this phenomenon play out as a drill, almost. But there has also been a powerful and small cosmopolitan section which has kept itself out of any strict political ideology but has changed tack from time to time, morphing pragmatically as the circumstance demanded. This group of people has always used their cultural capital for advancement in life. And tried to erect a stout support system. Working within a very closed and dedicated circle of mutual dependency. Academics, artists and writers, publishers and journalists of such a dispensation have often closed ranks—for they have no other way but to rely on patronage since they have kept themselves out of the political arena. The footloose writer or artist, from the other side, has depended on structures of patronage at all times. Indeed, in Bengal, Raja Krishna Chandra heavily patronized artists like Bidyapati and the sakta writings of Ramprasad, just as Raja Naba Krishna did with the likes of Haru Thakur. But what we are talking about is the patronage of an alien lettered class, developed much later and imbued with new ideas and novel methods. Over a period of time they have gotten entrenched in building institutions and have been given to using and circulating the benefits of their own new familial networks. Though far removed in time and space, a superb analysis of how a select group of gifted and cosmopolitan artists around Giotto di Bondone emerged under the patronage of the mendicant Franciscan friars and mercantile bankers has been meticulously studied by Julian Gardner in Giotto and His Publics: Three Paradigms of Patronage. The study goes far beyond the clichés of Giotto as the founding father of western art and illuminates the complex interplay between mercantile wealth and the iconography of poverty. The Franciscans were intensely local, many of them members of the leading civic families. True, the Florentines, much like the group of Bengalis we are talking about, are also often truly international and not merely global. But in practice, the internationalism of such coterie is marked by local preferences and traditions. In fact, any international success by way of an award or any other form of recognition of a member augments the imaginative cultural stature of the local patrons and the artist, who in his turn, would ideally return the favour, given a platform, by paying rich and nuanced tributes to the circles of local influence. The lonesome and precarious life of writing and art practice patiently await such recognition and patronage. The idea of the prodigal turns into a circulating and negotiating ideal. It is rather intriguing to speculate how this class of people who primarily rely on the twin pillars of learning and piety might negotiate with the emerging values of New India—heavily consumptive and nationalistic at the same time. Since this class has immense faith in its own capacity—creative, analytical or argumentative— and on the networks of the select, the first moves to enthuse the government or other funding bodies inevitably begin with a subtle form of paternalism: the view that taste can be created by
“Why are you laughing?” : George Seferis In Conversation With Edmund Keeley
George Seferis, in conversation with Edmund Keeley Seferis was nearing the end of his longest visit to the United States at the time of this interview, which took place in late December of 1968. He had just completed a three-month term as fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and he was in particularly good spirits because he felt that his visit had served for a kind of rejuvenation: an interlude free from the political tensions that had been building up for some months in Athens and the occasion for both reflection and performance. The latter included a series of readings—at Harvard, Princeton, Rutgers, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and the YMHA Poetry Center in New York—Seferis reading in Greek and the interviewer in English, each appearance with its distinct qualities of excitement and response. In Pittsburgh, for example, the audience (composed mostly of local Greek-Americans) seemed bewildered by the poetry during the reading but responded to the poet during the reception afterward as they might to Greece’s exiled king. The New York reading began with an introduction by Senator Eugene McCarthy. During the discussion period several questions from the audience had to do specifically with the political situation in Greece. Seferis refused to answer them. He was thought to be evasive by some in the audience, but he held his ground, and during the dinner following the reading he gave his reasons in private: He didn’t consider it proper to criticize his government while a guest on foreign soil, safely outside the boundaries of the government’s displeasure. He saved his answers for his return to Greece: an uncompromising statement against the dictatorship presented to local and foreign correspondents in defiance of martial law and at obvious personal risk (The New York Times, March 29, 1969). The combination of diplomatic tact and high conscience that defines the political character of Seferis also colors his presence and personal style. He is a heavy man, his voice gentle when disengaged, his movements slow, almost lethargic at times; yet he has a habit of gripping your arm as he moves, and the grip, though amiable in the old-fashioned European manner, remains young and firm enough to give you word of the strength still in him. And the voice has a second edge that cuts sharply when he senses something dubious or facile challenging it. Then, on the diplomatic side again, comes a sense of humor: a love of nonsense, of the risqué joke, of kidding himself and others with a wry little moon of a smile that appears unexpectedly in his oval face—especially after he’s trapped his listener with the question: “Why are you laughing?” An American poet once referred to him as a “Middle-Eastern troglodyte” in a poem about his first reading in New York some years ago. When the interviewer finally got up the courage to show him the poem, Seferis fixed him with a sharp, uncompromising look. “Middle-Eastern troglodyte. Ridiculous and inaccurate. I once called myself a Cappadocian troglodyte, and that is what I plan to remain. Why are you laughing?” Then the smile. The interview took place in the Seferis temporary home at the Institute for Advanced Study, an unpretentious second-floor apartment with three rooms, with a large window overlooking the grounds, the bookcase almost empty, none of the modern Greek paintings and classical treasures that set the style of the Seferis home in Athens. Yet the poet was delighted with the place because it gave him access to a number of exotic things: changing trees, and squirrels, and children crossing the lawn from school. His wife Maro—hair still gold and braided like a girl’s—was present throughout the interview, sometimes listening with apparent amusement, sometimes preparing food or drinks in the background. There were three recording sessions. Seferis would take a while to warm up with the microphone watching him from the coffee table, but whenever he began to reminisce about friends from the war years and before—Henry Miller, Durrell, Katsimbalis—or the years of his childhood, he would relax into his natural style and talk easily until the tape died out on him. ———————————————————– INTERVIEWER Let me start by asking you about the Institute for Advanced Study and how you feel, only recently retired from the diplomatic service, about beginning a new career as a student. GEORGE SEFERIS My dear, the problem which puzzles me is: What is advanced study? Should one try to forget, or to learn more, when one is at my stage of advanced study? Now I must say, on a more prosaic level, that I enjoy very much the whole situation here because there are very nice people, very good friends, and I enjoy—how shall I put it?—their horizons. There are many horizons around me: science, history, archaeology, theology, philosophy . . . INTERVIEWER But don’t you feel out of place among so many scientists? So many historians? SEFERIS No, because I am attracted by people whose interests are not in my own area. INTERVIEWER Do you think there’s an advantage—as I think Cavafy would probably have thought—to being in dialogue with historians? In other words, do you feel that history has something particular to say to the poet? SEFERIS If you remember, Cavafy was proud of having a sense of history. He used to say: “I am a man of history”—something like that, I don’t remember the exact quotation. I am not that way; but still, I feel the pressure of history. In another way, perhaps: more mythological, more abstract, or more concrete . . . I don’t know. INTERVIEWER How about the relation of the Greek poet to his particular historical tradition? You once said that there is no ancient Greece in Greece. What did you mean by that exactly? SEFERIS I meant Greece is a continuous process. In English the expression “ancient Greece” includes the meaning of “finished,” whereas for us Greece goes on living, for better or for worse; it is in life, has not expired yet. That is a fact. One can
Bhaskar Chakrabarty’s Diary—1982: A Selection
1/1 Gist. A political journalist is more than a prostitute. 1/1 a poem is a deer with a dream in it. 1/1 Defeat becomes us. 14/1 Piku-Sadgati— incomparable, incomparable 29/1 If you want to catch a thief, kick the police. 30/1 Kamalda’s painting exhibition—academy of fine arts. 3/2 Orphee. This Cocteau film I had probably seen ten years ago. Watched it again today. Timeless classic. Kamalda’s painting exhibition. 5/2 Jule et Jim. Incomparable. Kamalda’s exhibition over. 10/2 Have to bring such a kind of laughter into grasp that nothing will ever make it fade. 10/2 A man’s body lying in this room, burnt to death. 19/2 Akaler Shondhane. How a good film can be ruined, Mrinalbabu shows at the end. Weight – 70 kg 5/3 Is it because I have been able to love that I am suffering so every day? 17/3 They read quickly, badly, and pass judgement before they have understood.—J.P.S. If the poet relates, explains , or teaches, the poetry becomes prosaic; he has lost the game.—J.P.S. 19/3 I must admit that I have never written any political poetry. But still, if someone calls any poem political, I will not be surprised. 22/3 Lochandas Karigaar is a memorable experience. 7/4 Bought a book for Rs. 50. Sinned. 8/4 You can’t be misguided. 12/4 Sinned again. Book. Rs. 21.40. Adalat o Ekti Meye. 22/5 A procession of abortive poems. 1/6 Life is good. Very good. Death, not so much. 6/6 When everyone is running after money, I am writing poetry. No money if I fall ill again. How long shall Sejdi manage. 9/6 I will awake from within one day. Illumined, incandescent. Feels as if I am walking around in unknown, uncharted country. Relationships are getting denser—hesitantly. By no means am I lonely. 14/6 Huge trouble. Too many letters to write. Must list name and date from now on. We don’t have any secretary. 21/6 Learning to use words slowly, with time. Terrible poverty. 26/6 Truly, my deepest secret poems are like the light of imagination, running in a moment from hither to thither. As if I have really been blessed with a gift of two wings. How grateful am I to life. 30/6 After every single poem, one has to stir in suspicion and examine it closely—whether it is a poem indeed. 2/7 55 poems in 6 months! Never in my life. 4/7 Perhaps my shorter poems are buried under my prose-poems. Wrong thinking. Disrespectful. 6/7 Modern Times. Classical touch of a genius. 24/7 No letter even today! Everyone’s busy? 27/7 Reality, simplicity and humanity with superb imagination. B. C. 28/7 Have coughed the whole night. Who can survive so many cigarettes? 29/7 We never came to thoughts. They came to us. H. Not liking coffee house. We are too late for the God and too early for the Being. H. 2/8 One has to love even being swindled in life. 3/8 Alone at coffee house. Extra tension. I should live with children. Have not graded any examination script the whole day. Don’t know why, but I have never worked towards a lucrative job, marriage. Today, perhaps, I have inched pretty close to marriage. Discomfitting. 4/8 Hotel. Afternoon, 3.05. Daal-rice. Fried fish. 9/8 After a trillion years, this birth. She was my mother. He, my father. My young brother, sister, didi. A few friends. And then, just vanishing into the wide yonder. Again will not see them for many trillion years. This mystery beckons me today. 9/8 Exhausted. Need a break for a couple of days. Somewhere deserted—rest. Trysting with song—Santosh Sengupta, Dhiren Mitra and Ramkumar. 10/8 Common people’s words needs to be conveyed simply to the common people— Did the political parties ever realize this? Ever? 11/8 Let there be no vacuous optimism in my writing. 15/8 One more insignificant day. 18/ 8 If the front door is bolted, smash it to smithereens. Munna has fever. I feel it coming too. 24/8 Ceaselessly, to stand upon a rickety, tremulous life and write poetry. What excrutiating poverty. 25/8 So weak I have become. Continuously thinking of ma. 26/8 Be calm be calm just be calm. 27/8 This life I have wasted by writing. Had I not written, this life I would have wasted more. Terrible poverty. Losing joy in life again. Any which way, must rummage among the daily nuts and bolts of life for happiness. Must. 29/8 Spending since morning. 30/8 Weight—68 kg 2/9 Idiot! Learn how to lie. You will be happy. Have I to lie in order to be happy? 4/9 Why don’t those who want new kinds of writing from me go to the stationary shop? Coffee House. 7/9. Theory of rebirth. A consolation to earth-loving humans. These days the young ones engage in opinion-mongering. For me Bibhutibhushan’s Ichhamati is no less than And Quiet Flows the Don. 9/9 I painfully realize today that there is nothing I can do other than writing poetry. 15/9 Can we not ever get the vast star studded night into language, into poetry? Being my own friend and my own enemy I have done, continually, so many plain chores, wishing to die silently. 16/9 In every moment of life, rejection entangles us. One has to accept it. One has to love more. Anger, excitement– I must eliminate from life. I have forgotten the habit of walking on roads. Have to start afresh in a quiet way. 17/9 I have always played with danger since childhood. Paying the penalty for that today. When Sejdi, too, tells me to write prose, I feel really anguished. 20/9 Greed, I must win over. Restraint, a valuable gift. Impassivity, stay with me. Beware. Disquiet ahead. 22/9 Someone who slipslides away from another
Shrapnel Minima: The Acknowledgment Page
[ The humanitiesunderground book is about to appear soon. Within a month’s time perhaps. We thank every single well wisher and reader. Below, a reproduction of the acknowledgment page.] tutulova & all my students— past, present and future Aknowledgement Gone are the days of deft touch. And hauteur. People are jogging playing eating dancing writing making friends in order to win. But humanities is not about winning. It is a different trip. Only those who have experienced loss and defeat again and again in life have the right to read poetry or epic. One has to earn this right. But we are rejecting this suicidal, cosmic urge. We are separating literature from life or considering art as a pleasing form of exercise leading to inspired creativity. Our best minds are keeping the forgotten and the defeated out of their circles. Something singular is happening around us in India. May be around the world. Our natural inclination for the angular and the passionate, the irreverent and the metaphorical, the despairing and the restless is brimming but we hardly see these moods expressed—in print or on the internet, as graffiti or in popular iconography! We have made sure our humanities departments remain professional coops, at best procedural debating societies. Quite naturally, our sense of the pointedly political, our sensuous immersion in beings and bodies around us and our rasa-bodha–aesthetic sensibility—are unable to cohere and conjoin. Or so it seems. For, in Haldwani, Uttarakhand, Ashok Pande is silently laying out and scattering the spirit of humanities through his blog Kabaadkhaana. He has scant interest in being topical. His world is quaint and quirky and through an expansive vision he is richly measuring our time. In Darjeeling, West Bengal Sumanta Mukhopadhyay conceives our terrifying and confident new India as a myth, endlessly repeated as history. But innovate he must, instead of looking inward. Thus begins his cycle of poems. At Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, coffee houses are abuzz and still frequented by the editor and writer Gyanranjan and his committed band every single day so that they can chalk and plan life and literature; this, a few hours away from Bhopal where the aesthetic war has long been raging with the power brokers of Bharat Bhavan. The battle lines will be far tougher in the days to come. In Patna, Bihar, Krishna Kalpit is aphoristically and cosmologically capturing our times along with two of his intimate friends—Parth and Sartre! At Dungarpur, Rajasthan, Himanshu Pandya is teaching, writing, organizing and directing us towards the sharpest of writings coming out of the smallest of places from the whole of North India. Come every Sunday, Upal Deb, from Guwahati, Assam is expanding our lust for life by gifting us a new set of poems on the internet, chosen meticulously from a dazzling spectrum of poets from all around the world. He is grounded and astutely political. Friends are reading humanitiesunderground. Friends are contributing. New friends are joining in. Salaam to Manash Bhattacharjee, Trina Nileena Banerjee and Richa Burman for fostering a sense of demanding ease and occasional splashes of laidback drizzle in this parched world of insecurity and one-upmanship. Moinak Biswas reserves and retains faith in our collective ‘party office’ and Soumyabrata Choudhury continues to push the boundaries of intellect and performance. In unknown, inexplicable ways, both of them, their ways of looking into art and politics and styling of the persona have shaped humanitiesunderground. Salut. Varuni Bhatia, Sharmadip Basu, Arundhati Ghosh, Srirupa Prasad, Niharika Banerjea, Bhaswati Ghosh, Aryak Guha, Mrinalini Chakravorty, Santanu Das, Subha Mukherjee, Joad Raymond, Geeta Patel, Anil Menon, Samantak Das, T.P. Sabitha, Saurabh Dube, Nauman Naqvi, Amitranjan Basu, Indranil Chakraborty, Shrimoy Roy Chowdhury, Prashant Keshavmurthy, Gautam Basu Thakur, Ravindran Sriramchandran, Oishik Sircar, Amrit Gangar, Parimal Bhattacharya, Amrita Dhar, Phalguni Ghosh, Sumana Roy, Ananya Mukherjee, Ananya Dutta Gupta, Rana Roychowdhury, Paulomi Chakraborty, Kamalika Mukherjee, Shubhasree Bhattacharya and Pavel Chakraborty—I thank all of you for supporting and espousing humanitiesunderground from afar. Amlan Dasgupta, Michael Levenson, Jairus Banaji, Rimli Bhattacharya, Ajay Skaria, Tista Bagchi, Sunalini Kumar, G. Arunima, Rahul Govind, Rina Ramdev, Akhil Katyal, Anchita Ghatak, Saroj Giri, Sanghamitra Misra, Franson Manjali, Puttezhath Sunil Menon, Moushumi Bhowmik, Aditya Nigam, Avik Bannerjee, Arundhati Chakrabarti, Maya Joshi and Sunit Singh for interventions, suggestions and encouragement at regular intervals. Piyali and Saurav Chakravarty your animated disposition in every activity drives me and you are present in every single atom of my life. I am forever grateful to Bhargavi & Srinjoy Mukherjee—for those fabulous weekends in Bangalore and endless sessions of adda that would take away the drudgery of closed, tedious academic routine. The wanderlust spirit of Tautik Das, Rohini Datta and Anirban Dutta amazes me to no end. They remain an absolute inspiration to any work that may foster questioning. Moutusi Maity and G.S. Chakravarty I cannot thank enough for their relentless argumentative spirit that daily makes me aware of other, significantly differing viewpoints and for entrusting faith in the underlying principles that shapes humanitiesunderground as an intellectual endeavor. And most of all: for putting up with my rant and habits, every single day. I am obliged to thank Ernesto Laclau and Jim Holstun—dazzling minds both. And whose divergent political ways and my proximity to both revealed to me how academia may not be an utterly self absorbed world. As the world turns decisively rightward, their viewpoints do not seem so contrastive. Nilanjan Guha—a more expansive and carefree spirit I am yet to see. Whenever doubts and vexations have bothered me, your ways and thoughts have acted as a tranquilizer. Pothik Ghosh—thank you for alerting me about some of Fredrick Jameson’s writings on modernism and for other ongoing debates. Your relentless correlating of the intellectual arsenal to everyday practices and resistance movements (or perhaps it is vice versa!) is a matter of inspiration. We strive for it and fall short. Rajarshi Dasgupta—may your ruthless intellectual pessimism clash ever more violently with your daily, passionate lust for languorous living. And Brinda Bose, may you continue to counter