The Wind Instruments

HUG Editorial ______________________ # Humanities Studies in India at this Point of Time. There are two sides to it. One, institutional studies of the humanities. By that we mean the study of the languages and letters, arts & aesthetics. We are advisedly narrowing down humanities into certain specific fields—not to restrict its ambit but to highlight a methodological breakthrough and rigour that is missing in the narrow sense to begin with. There are many worthy ways of getting into the question of humanities but we still do not possess a sense of independently gauging and defining what might constitute humanities in the subcontinent per se at this point of time. Nor is there any concerted effort to give it fillip and direction. It is a doubly difficult proposition given the heterogeneity of languages and their internal arguments and hierarchies within the humanities academia itself. In India, the once intense parley between the votaries of philological and hermeneutic approaches on one hand, and the then counter-institutional challenges to canon formation and so on on the other, has largely come to an end. There is a meek sense of mea-culpa among the erstwhile rebels within the academia and a vigorous return of parsing and textual studies as a fodder for nation building simultaneously. The coming together of these twin developments are not an accident. It is as a result and fallout of such a consensual unanimity that fields like digital humanities, area studies, book history, archive building, world-literature and so on flourish. Only a limited few within the academia have any sense of what goes beyond the shibboleths of the seminar hall, projects, the archives and transnational travel. # Why largely Static and Undeviating? Partly, the reasons are external—namely, systematic undermining of existing structures within our universities and colleges and lack of support for independent research institutions that would deal exclusively in the humanities. But external factors are sometimes beyond our control. A more significant reason is the lack of imagination and drive from the scholars themselves to independently or collectively break fresh ground. If seen closely, this is not surprising, for unlike history or sociology, institutional forms of humanities in India have been remarkably conformist and self-consuming. In order to pay lip service to social radicalism, it allowed the social sciences to define its scope, ambit and methods in the final decades of the last century. It was the social sciences which worked as a bridge between hard sciences and the humanities—methodologically speaking. The result was a burgeoning of derivative humanities in the name of critical studies. The term culture studies was a trite and baggy offshoot of the same impulse. Barring some initial success such forays routinely accommodate unoriginality. On the other hand, there began a growing affair with philosophy and medical sciences by way of addressing the question of ethics within humanities. This is also imitative. Worthy as they are, in the long term, these forays could not help humanities reinvent itself. With no genuine critical tool within its own arsenal, humanities was left to flounder when it came to addressing contemporary developments in art and literature. By then, barring a minuscule and privileged fraction of the academic world, humanities studies had relinquished the disciplinary ways of interpreting the subjective and textual elements. It had forgotten the ways to recapitulate of the past and the techniques to churn the ordinary materiality of the senses. As a result of this two things have happened: one, a kowtowing to the social sciences with a shallow lip service paid to that fit-all buzzword: interdisciplinary. One must always remember though that whenever that word is used there is always and always a prioritizing of certain disciplines at the cost of some other. It is never a level playing field. And two, as a corollary to that, the humanities departments have lost touch with the intensity and the edge required of art and literature that would bring generations of students and researchers to study humanities. No amount of rethinking or probematizing around cobbled up refresher courses is going to bring forth any original verve within the academe. It is a fruitful thing to converse and work in tandem with other disciplines as long as you have your own priorities and aims periodically thrashed out from within the boundaries of your discipline. #Are there some Other Ways? Institutional study of humanities will continue to rely on its own routines and practices. That is not going to change soon. An instance: poetry, in many ways, is the defining impulse of humanities. And poets abound. As long as humans live they shall hum and intone. But there has not been any path-breaking study of that primary impulse of humanities by our academic literary critics. We mean truly original and sustained work. None. Not even from beyond the antiseptic world of English studies. This is a fundamental lack. There is only one conclusion to be drawn: that the academia, more often than not, is unable to make sense of animated subjectivity, the imperatives of rhythm and repetition. It likes to play the string instrument which allows one to be the master of oneself. Whereas, flute, pipe or clarinet puts you beside yourself. In her magisterial work Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart has reminded us that the wind instruments are endowed with the force of possession which is a vehicle of transformation and self transformation. The academia is intimidated by the power of the wind. It painstakingly trains itself to be deaf to the voice of the choric, tragic and the lyric. So, we must move beyond the academia in order to relate to our basic impulses. There is a parallel set of places where humanities can be deepened. The market forces understand that parallel world best. So they form ententes with academics, publishers, authors and connoisseurs and give us this periodic jamboree of literary, art and crafts festivals. They give us poetry reading sessions, film appreciation workshops and cultural retreats. These in turn lead
The Edifice

Ranajit Das __________________ Journal Entry I I still recall quite vividly that horrendous moment when my little one realized, for the first time, what a lie is. I remember, face to face with untruth for the first time in her life, those bewildered, derelict eyes of hers. Unfortunately, it was I who had told her that lie. The thing was one among numerous stupid and jocular adult lies: if kids do not sleep at their appointed time, then the police would visit and take them away. My baby, perhaps she used to believe that each material thing in this world is truthful, that every word uttered is authentic. This, my cautioning too she had come to believe. That she used to believe this in all sincerity was a fact because every time this precept was told to her at night, her countenance paled. Unable to leash her natural energetic self, she would look at us—helpless, resigned. May be the little one would be suffering greatly within, for failing truth? Then one day from one of our exchanges, she suddenly realized that this threat was not true at all. With stunned eyes, as she tried tracing the contours of our canny,guilty faces, she discovered untruth. I could see that somewhere behind her dumbfounded visage a whole edifice was crumbling. Perhaps her first universe, her world of verity was abandoning her. Since then, whenever I recall that moment, I begin to turn wood-stiff, queasy. I can feel that in my brain those down-and out, destitute eyes are pierced like a knife. I want to run, like a madman, from that look. But the earth and the soil, light, that sky seeking to converse with the horizon—all seem like an ashen extension of that look. I am unable to evade it and slink away. Journal Entry II We hardly know what truth is. But untruth we do know, unerring, like our shadows. In this lifetime of confusion about truth, the lie is our most manifest realization. In that sense, the lie is our most trusted truth. Our refuge. Our comrade. With a twinkle in his eyes, the one who says that knowing untruth also means knowing the truth, he is Nachiketa. Pig-ignorant we are. Inside our brains meteorites batter constantly. All around us heaps of acorns and saplings. And we—scuttlebutts and scandalmongers of the ancient rocks. It is likely that right from our mother’s wombs we have known untruth. Perhaps in the deepest twilight codes of our genes, the definition and usage manual of the lie is carefully inscribed. Still, for once, in that nerve-wracking moment of our childhood, we are startled by our first encounter with the lie. Only once in our whole life such piercing, woebegone stupefaction. Our first and last celestial moment. *** Ranajit Das is a poet from Bengal. He is writing since 1966. He loves football, cinema and travelling all alone. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
“Aao Radio Sunein”: Manto’s Radio Plays

Aakriti Mandhwani _______________________________ [i] Saadat Hasan Manto is arguably best known for his oft-acerbic, yet true-to-life depiction of the tragedies that befell India during the partition. “Khol Do” is one such popular narrative; Manto pens the short story of a young girl who is separated from her father during the Partition and, upon her rescue raped so persistently by her “rescuers” that she, even after having been returned to her father, mechanically opens her shalwar when the hospital doctor has merely asked someone to open the windows in the room. Manto’s skilful climax brings to the fore the painful understanding of how, following the carnage of the Partition, language itself loses its complexity and results in the fixing of one particular meaning; indeed, “Khol Do”, for the girl, has come to mean only one thing. Of “Toba Tek Singh”, another of his pungent stories on the Partition, prescribed in numerous university syllabi, which, in many senses, can be deemed partly responsible for Manto’s name in contemporary popular circulation, M. Asaduddin paradoxically says, “The name ‘Toba Tek Singh’ creates all this resonance… It is only some moments later that one thinks of Manto, the writer who created the character. It is the classic case of a fictional character overshadowing its creator”. However, even as the power of Manto as short story writer is noted and feted, he did not only pen short stories. He is equally well-known for his biting account of the film industry of pre-Partition Bombay and its stars, in a post-Partition series of essays titled “Ganjey Farishtey”. Before the Partition, along with his other illustrious contemporaries like Krishen Chander and Rajinder Singh Bedi, Manto was also a writer of film stories. His other professions included being a translator, critic and editor. However, another fact—noted by every biographer, yet always in passing and, therefore, not chronicled well enough—is that Manto worked at All India Radio (AIR) in Delhi for 18 months from the beginning of 1940 to August 1942, writing more than 110 radio plays during his time there. I would like to uncover Manto’s relationship with this forgotten archive, that is, the radio plays he wrote for AIR. Manto self-confessedly turned to radio as a means of sustenance, at a time when he could not get any other work that paid him nearly as much[ii]. Through a close examination of some of the plays written by Manto for AIR, the essay shall seek to understand how Manto, as an artist, dealt with the material that was meant to be broadcast over radio, to examine the contradictions between writing for what seems to be commercial gain. Manto’s treatment of this difference between writing for AIR as against writing short stories for publication shall be uncovered through his own views on it, and the contradictions that lie within the artist that provide the logic for such demarcations shall be probed. Even as the Manto oeuvre ranges well over 110 radio-plays, because of language limitations and difficulty in accessing the archives at AIR[iii], I shall only examine the plays included in Dastaawez Part 3[iv] . Manto the “Artist” vs. Manto the “Commercial” Writer An artist, writing and making a living in the modern marketplace, is understood to make a distinction between the art he makes for personal satisfaction and the art he seeks to sell. More often than not, both these kinds of writings are simultaneously available in the public domain, since the writer seeks appreciation for the art that gives him personal satisfaction. Pierre Bourdieu, in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field says of writing: “It is instituted through two principal mediations: on the one hand, the market, whose sanctions and constraints are exercised on literary enterprises either directly, by means of sales figures, numbers of tickets sold and so forth, or indirectly, through new positions offered in journalism, publishing, illustration and all forms of industrialized literature; and on the other hand, durable links, based on affinities of lifestyle and value systems, and operating especially through the intermediary of the salons, which unite at least a portion of the writers to certain sections of high society, and help to determine the direction of the generosities of state patronage.” It can, therefore, be understood that a writer, at any time, has to deal with both these questions simultaneously. In Manto’s context, the second option—that which seeks to “unite at least a portion of the writers to certain sections of high society”—was not feasible in the sense that Bourdieu thinks of it, namely, that of “state patronage”. However, for Manto, it indeed was “based on affinities of lifestyle and value systems, and operating especially through the intermediary of the salons, which unite at least a portion of the writers”, and that was a movement called the Progressive Writer’s Association (PWA). Instituted in 1936, the PWA united and perhaps even encouraged the form of the Urdu short story, a fairly recent phenomenon in the history of Urdu literature, to grow. The similarities between the intent and value judgements of Manto’s short stories—even as he, throughout his life, completely sought to disengage from movements of any kind—and the work of other pioneers of the progressive Urdu short story form, do stand in agreement with the general collective judgments that are so essentially a part of the PWA. Asaduddin mentions that, at the time of Manto’s joining, other personalities like Ahmad Shah Bukhari, N.M. Rashid, Chiragh Hasan Hasrat, Miraji and Upendranath Ashk were also associated with AIR. Though a perfect delineation is difficult to make—especially in the case of an artist such as Manto who actively avoided being grouped in any institutional way—at this point, the essay tentatively proposes to set up a dichotomy between Manto’s art and Manto’s commercial work, with Manto’s art leaning towards the expectations that the PWA, during its formative years, had from its literature. This dichotomy is proposed not only because of Manto’s personal interactions and timorous debates with other members of the PWA,