A Whiff and a Whistle
HUG Speaks to Monika Kumar on her poem छुट्टियों में पेड़ों को भूल जाओ (During Absences, Abandon the Trees) ___________________________ During Absences, Abandon the Trees Up on the first floor of the building As soon as I reach my office Tall trees I begin to touch. No sooner do I touch them, I think I must keep my brain calm After all, we have not come to this world To feel good or bad about what people say Still, every month, a day comes When I try to open my office door with my house-keys It entirely depends, how much during those days, I am pinned and pegged Meshed and merged in the world After a break of three days Morning, and I enter my office Looking at the trees It comes to my mind During the break Not for once did I remember these trees The kadamb trees, one look at them And one feels there should be a limit to beauty, Had forgotten me I do not recall these trees during long absences Still it comforts me to think that they are, In changing climate, in deep attachment Greedy to swing on the edges of a breeze Frantic so, so rapt So still, restless so My trees informed me It is good to forget beauty Not to recall them during breaks Until the edge of untruth To come back and entreat love To touch again and again And say How could I stay away from you so long? To do significant things we have come to this world It is also an important task To lose oneself in the world Feel good and bad about what people say Destroy one’s solitariness So that one can rue later And practice imploration with the trees For their constancy छुट्टियों में पेड़ों को भूल जाओ ईमारत के प्रथम तल पर बने अपने दफ्तर में पहुँचते ही ऊंचे पेड़ों का स्पर्श करती हूँ इन्हें छूते ही विचार आता है मुझे दिमाग को ठंडा रखना चाहिए आखिर हम दुनिया में बातों का अच्छा बुरा मानने नहीं आए हैं फिर भी माहवार ऐसे दिन आते हैं जब घर की चाभी से दफ्तर का ताला खोलने की कोशिश करती हूँ निर्भर करता है उन दिनों मैं कितना मिली जुली कैसे घुली मिली दुनिया में तीन दिन के अवकाश के बाद मैं सुबह दफ्तर आई पेड़ों को देखकर ख़याल आया इन छुट्टियों में मुझे एक बार भी इन पेड़ों की याद नहीं आई कदंब के फूल जिन्हें देखकर लगता है इतना सुन्दर भी न हुआ करे कोई मुझे भूल गए थे मुझे नहीं आते याद ये पेड़ लंबी छुट्टियों में फिर भी यहाँ लौट कर तस्सली करती हूँ कि वे हैं बदलते मौसम के साथ गहरे प्रेम में हवा के एक झोंके पर झूलने के लिए आतुर इतने कातर इतने भावुक जितने स्थिर उतने आकुल मेरे पेड़ों ने कहा मुझसे अच्छा है सुन्दरता को भूल जाना छुट्टियों में उसे याद न करना झूठा लगने की हद तक लौट कर प्रेम जताना बार बार छूना और कहना कैसे रही मैं इतने दिन तुमसे दूर दुनिया में बहुत काम करने आए हैं हम उस में यह भी ज़रूरी काम है दुनिया में खो जाना लोगो की बातों का अच्छा बुरा मानना नष्ट करना अपने एकांत को बाद में पछतावे के लिए और विनय करना पेड़ों से इसकी बहाली के लिए ___________________ Prasanta: Let me begin by referring to an entangled contrast that the poem builds up, by emphasizing a simultaneous and double hankering on our part—of a need to be part of this world and also practice a peculiar untying and disengagement. What is unfolding here? Say, at the level of craft itself—this detached entanglement is brought sharply to us by a repetition and a reversal. After all, we have not come to this world To feel good or bad about what people say आखिर हम दुनिया में बातों का अच्छा बुरा मानने नहीं आए हैं 2. To do significant things we have come to this world It is also an important task To lose oneself in the world Feel good and bad about what people say दुनिया में बहुत काम करने आए हैं हम उस में यह भी ज़रूरी काम है दुनिया में खो जाना लोगो की बातों का अच्छा बुरा मानना We are simultaneously left to sense an ambivalent feeling, which is also at the heart of the poem; a certain mood and a thought develop. What should be the ‘self’s’ relationship to our belonging, our worldliness buffeted by its constant inbound turnings? Monika: इसे किसी औपचारिक संवाद का हिस्सा बनाने के लिए नहीं लेकिन आपने कविता से जो एक थीम निकाला है, उस पर मैं कुछ और कहना चाहती हूँ. सच तो यह है प्रशांत कि न केवल हमारे दुनिया से संबंध कैसा हो, जिंदगी की अधिकतर चीज़ों को निरंतर सर्वेक्षण करते हुए मेरा मन ambivalent हो जाता है आखिर कार. मुझे पता है इस तरह की अप्रोच से नॉन-क्मिटल की अवस्था भी आती है जो अंतत न्याय और सत्य के प्रश्न को अच्छे से अड्रैस नहीं कर पाती. यह उत्तराधुनिक्वाद की आलोचना भी है. पिछले दिनों मैं दलित साहित्य पढ़ रही थी, रोना आ रहा था वे कहानियां और कवितायेँ पढ़ कर हालाँकि उस साहित्य में आप मुख्धारा साहित्य की अपेक्षा लेकर रसास्वादन के लिए नहीं जा सकते, लेकिन यही उस साहित्य का ध्येय है की वह आपका उस आसपास घटित हो रहे जीवन से परिचय कराए जिसमें षड्यंत्र से किसी रस की गुंजाईश नहीं छोड़ी गई. पिछले कुछ वर्षों से मैं जातिवादी समाज की बदसूरती को और करीब से देखने की कोशिश कर रही हूँ जबकि दलित चिन्तक शायद ठीक कहते हैं कि इसे मैं केवल एक आउटसाइडर की तरह ही समझ सकती हूँ. मैं इस बारे में इलैक्ट्रोन मात्र भी ambivalent नहीं हूँ कि यह गलत, अन्यायपूर्ण और शर्मनाक है. मैक्रो और मैक्रो किसी भी स्तर से देखने से यह मुझे बेहद शर्मनाक लगता है. अपने घर और क्लास में मैं कोशिश करती हूँ
The Counter-Romantic
[An Excerpt from The Opulence of Existence, First Edition January 2017 copyright©Prasanta Chakravarty & Three Essays Collective 2016 All rights reserved] _____________________________________________________ I’ll join with black despair against my soul, And to myself become an enemy. ~Queen Elizabeth in Richard III, Act II, Scene ii সারা রাস্তা সোনার তারের মত শব্দ | The whole journey rings like a golden wire. ~অনন্ত ভাস্কর/Ananta Bhaskar, Swadesh Sen There lies a straightforward premise behind these essays: that there is an implacable impulse, a code which sometimes drives our aesthetic choices and political decisions—one that places life under a stubborn, primordial scalpel, then passes it through a luminous and unsentimental lens. That mode refuses to run along available courses. So richly and seriously is this mode attentive and attuned to the minutiae of life’s splendours and its deepening sorrows that it is doomed to walk an unescorted furrow. But that furrow does not isolate; no, it is not lyrical in its acceptance of our finitude. It rather takes us closer to: whatever is. We are not talking about vexations of the psyche here. Nor are we terribly worried about the ethical conundrum of the being. This mode also does not deal in experience past. No, in a world riven with inequity and bigotry, one must constantly refuse to let any ontological virtue ossify into a fixed identity or being. This collection of essays is rather about dire, unyielding journeys— undertakings, which are also enchanting, star-crossed spells. Such journeys shun the romantic overestimate of human virtue and moral capacity, current in our maudlin and dolorous culture. The appraisal of social facts happens through other, discrete routes. These routes keep out of ideational essences. The essays try to record a series of hard, heightened moments, each hoping to grapple with the forces of endurance along with an awed absorption of flux. Only when we are able to put ourselves in the mannerist gyre of such bewitchment can we revel and tremble before the opulence of existence. We are then able to stand aside. And controvert, when the time arrives. Only that much is worth recording. Shubha, one of the finest of our contemporary poets, captures this spare, stubborn drive rather accurately— एक आदमी प्रतिद्वंद्विता की औड़ से बाहर हो जाता है ख़ुद दौड़ की लाईन देखता है एक फ़िल्मी दृश्य की तरह उसके पार जैसे कुछ है जिसे देखता वह अकेला नहीं होता धारण करता है दुख और शोक चुपचाप इच्छाओं को ज़बान पर नहीं लाता कभी-कभी वह एक रहस्य की तरह नज़र आता है वह हँसता भी है और खाना भी खाता है। One man himself opts out of competition’s track Like a scene in a film he observes the finishing line As if there is something beyond it, seeing which He does not feel alone Wordlessly bears sorrow and grief Does not bring desires to his lips Sometimes he seems like a mystery He does smile and eats food too. But to assiduously, doggedly embark on life’s travails is not to practice and perpetrate the mystical. Quite the contrary. We do not just tremble like a guilty thing surprised in front of the mountain or the sceptre. There is no complacence of any massive calm. In a rapidly antagonistic and fractious world it is impossible to remain captivated by Blanqui’s eternal melancholic stars where we, guests on our planet, are just prisoners of the moment, “sadder still this sequestration of brother-worlds through the barrier of space.” That kind of tragic-romantic view shall lead us to accept a repetitive fixity in the universe: the ricorsi. Eventually, that will make us all vassals to power—natural or artificial. But opulence is about acknowledging and engaging with the differences and the wonderment that lie all around us. Without rhetoric or palliation. Purer forms of romanticism eventually would lead to negative forms of mood and imagination to the point of alienation from body and habitat. Susan Stewart in her nuanced, piercing work The Poet’s Freedom points out the contrast between Coleridge, whose fear of nothingness was expressed in his opium habit and rejection of fancy and Shelley, who mastered to “fear himself and love others.” It is Shelley who realizes that we are “thrown back on the task of forming our freedom,” and Coleridge who stands as a warning that “liberated from time and space, the imagination is nowhere.” Poetry and politics come together at these synapses—where imagination’s flight is thrown back on our travails and labour, until we soar once again. One may tentatively call such a calumnious absorption with things that pass by us: the counter-romantic, one that ferociously takes stock of transitions and recastings—that are born and bred within structures of power and conflict, sometimes measured and played out in the creation, reception and circulation of things that we call art. Only a counter-romantic spirit can save us from egotist, sentimental and antihistoricist forms of romanticism and at the same time keep on reminding us that life is much richer than what the dehumanizing forms of pragmatic, correct or realist undertakings will allow us to believe. This counter-romantic practice spreads in the very sensuousness and struggles of our daily partakings. It is not an isolated way of living—for as Shubha has marked above: the man smiles and eats too—that is to say, he is active and completes his earthly chores as he must, although he seems to be dormant and lethargic. He has but taken only one decision: to walk outside of the track that promotes egotistical competition, smallness and radical inequality among fellow creatures. The man joins forces with the rest of the human race in the last line. There is a dignified ascent, for the very mundaneness and monotony of eating and smiling are at once a chore and a possibility. He has not tuned in and opted for higher frequencies. His
Swallowing Down Burning Coals: Chaos, Impertinence and Treason in the Coffee House
Arpit Kumar __________________ “Yet these will o’er their Jewish Liquor, About Religion Jar and Bicker; And rave till grown as Piping Hot, As the dull Grout o’er which they sot.” ~Ned Ward in ‘Vulgus Britannicus: or, the British Hudibras’ At first sight, the world of the long-eighteenth century English coffee-house is immediately comprehensible and familiar. A meeting place for friends, for leisurely reading and talk over a cup of coffee, for the occasional discussion of news and politics – it is a metaphor for culture itself. The coffee-house has also always lingered in the background of literary criticism of the long-eighteenth century as a space frequented by the likes of John Dryden, Samuel Pepys, Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. Addison and Steele promised to bring out philosophy out of its sheltered and closeted life to the crowds of the coffee-house. It was recorded thus in accounts of the literature, culture and life of the long-eighteenth century until the publication of Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere(1962; trans. 1989) where it became much more – the focal point of an emerging formation, the bourgeois public sphere, where strangers gathered, outside the structures of the traditional authority of the church and the state, to converse over matters of ‘common concern’ in a manner that nurtured ‘rational critical deliberation’ and eventually validated the legitimacy of institutions of authority. In such a framework, the coffee-house was seen as a converging point for the various energies of modernity – print, secular sociability, consumption and commerce, the scientific temper and a training ground for democracy. In Terry Eagleton’s Function of Criticism, the coffee-house and the various discursive projects that formed around it gave birth to modern criticism itself. These are claims that have since been variously substantiated, contested and, in some cases, rejected but the fascination with coffee-house culture has not only endured but rather blossomed in the twenty-first century. Markman Ellis published The Coffee House: A Cultural History in 2004 that documented the travels of the beverage from the Levant region to London (in 1652) and its life thereafter whereas Brian Cowan published The Social Life of Coffee (2004) where the early life of coffee among the virtuosi and the wits is considered in depth. These relatively recent publications build on the work of other historians of the coffee-house, chief among them is Aytoun Ellis who described the eighteenth century coffee-house as ‘penny universities’ to emphasize the role it played in the education and improvement of the eighteenth century public. A whole host of other literary critics and historians have analyzed coffee-house culture with their own points of emphasis. Lawrence Klein has documented the significance of the coffee-house in the process of defining a culture of politeness that, he believes, existed in the long-eighteenth century. Emma Clery locates the world of the coffee-house at the center of a discursive deployment of the category of the feminine in association with commerce to illustrate its consequences for the social and cultural landscape of England. These interventions have revealed a greater complexity the coffee-house as it becomes more than a transcendental space of reason but rather appears as a space that was as much of the past as of the future. One can attempt to derive from, and build upon, these interventions that have complicated the nature and function of the coffee-house. This complexity lends itself to an extended analysis of the conceptualization of the public sphere, picking up from Jurgen Habermas and his critics, to deepen the concept so as to be able to accommodate a less homogeneous interpretation of coffee-house culture. The fact of the matter is that Habermas’ idealization of the long eighteenth century English ‘bourgeois public sphere’ gets complicated in the face of direct empirical and conceptual queries that prove beyond doubt that it systematically excluded participation. The conflation of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘homme’ is more than misleading; it’s an attempt to pre-empt and settle the boundaries of the public sphere. It doesn’t merely exclude participation but it pre-defines what constitutes ‘matters of general concern’ and the forms in which they can be ‘discussed’ and ‘deliberated’. These aren’t new problems for those critics who foreground and emphasize Habermas’ Kantian orientation.[1] A detour through Shaftesbury, however, may allow us to develop a closer understanding of the kind of individual subjectivity that sustains Habermas’ proposed public sphere. The politeness and civility of the utterances emerging from the coffee-house suggest a notion of refined and virtuous publics but this chapter will attempt to articulate another template which displaces civility with contestation, controversy and conflict. Nancy Fraser’s critique of the Habermasian public sphere demands a radical re-opening of the public sphere in relation to the participation and issues of a diverse set of stakeholders. It is important to recognize that the diversity of stakeholders doesn’t merely imply a diversity of interests; it also implies a diversity of discursive styles, a multiplicity of languages and an obfuscation of normalized lines of behaviour and action. At all times, in any given ‘public sphere’, understood as a coming together of utterances in dialogue, a gradual concretization of boundaries occurs which results in the identification and categorization of certain utterances as standing in violation of the public sphere. These utterances expose, therefore, the limits of any imagined/real notion of open publicness and become touchstones in the testing of the strength of an actually existing public sphere. In this chapter, the attempt will be to highlight such utterances that emerge from the margins or from ‘the outside’ of the public sphere in such a fashion that they are immediately perceived as threats. In doing so, the focus will be upon multiple dimensions of discourse: the thematic and substantive content of what is said, the ways and means of expressing (styles, genres, and rhetoric) and the difficulty, therefore, of retaining the template of ‘rational discourse’. This multiplicity and discursive variety has always been an integral part of the matrix of language itself but its visibility increases manifold in the age