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
Literature No Longer Impresses Me
Like the lighthouse glowing red–Lal Singh ‘Dil’ (stills from the film Kitte Mil Ve Mahi–Where the Twain Shall Meet, directed by Ajay Bhardwaj) ___________________________________ *** *** [listen, we must first pay tribute to Sant Ram Udasi] *** [i am a rogue poet who drinks and defies all norms] *** [but carries the weapons in the vanguard of the struggle] *** [these are noble poets–Udasi, Paash and Shiv Kumar Batalvi] *** [if they are songs sung by crusaders for freedom] *** [some thoughts cannot be erased] *** [why do you cry your eyes out] *** [why are you always humiliated thus] *** [you are unique o shining one] *** [your incandescence everywhere] *** [some thoughts cannot be erased] *** [if they songs sung by crusaders fort freedom] *** [why do you cry your eyes out] *** [why are you always humiliated thus] *** [you are unique o shining one your incandescence everywhere] *** [like the lighthouse glowing red] *** [that shows the way out of darkness] *** [an arm severed, a strange pain] *** [when our friends…brothers die] *** [it is as if we lose our arms] *** [the pain of losing arm] *** [an arm severed, a strange pain not a sigh, not a reflection] *** [who is there to stem our tears if we cry] *** [there is more to come in life ahead] *** [they who do not stand up for their rights] *** [live like donkeys slogging, hogging and dying] *** [those (who stand up) are suns showering rays of light] *** [one darkness, the other light an eternal war between them] *** [where the moonbeam does not stand guard] *** [there darkness camps forever] *** [when many suns die your era will dawn…isn’t it] *** *** [this is dedicated to Sant Ram Udasi] _____________________________________ adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Akhand Sphota
Amarjit Chandan ____________________________ [Born in Nairobi, Amarjit Chandan graduated from Punjab University. As a result of his active involvement in the Maoist Naxalite movement in his youth, he was imprisoned and spent two years in solitary confinement. Chandan has edited many anthologies of world poetry and fiction, including two collections of “British Punjabi” poetry and short fiction. Translated into Greek, Turkish, Hungarian, Romanian and various Indian languages, his work is included in several anthologies in India and abroad. He has participated in poetry readings in England, Hungary and at Columbia University. An active translator, he has translated work by Brecht, Neruda, Ritsos, Hikmet and Cardenal, among others, into Punjabi. There is a silence in Chandan’s poetry — a deep sense of the unspoken, and more accurately, the unspeakable. This is, no doubt, intimately connected with his years of solitary confinement in an Amritsar prison. In an interview (not included in this edition) he declares that his belief in “violence as a midwife of change” has long been buried. But what is not so easy to bury is memory: memory of torture, sleep deprivation and of the interminable hours in a prison cell, in which time frayed his nerves “like chalk screeching on a blackboard. You count your breaths, lose count and start again . . . I’m a poet, yet there are no words to explain these feelings, this loss of spirit.” ] _________________ The history of the unequal relationship between English and Punjabi goes back to the early nineteenth century, when William Carey, a shoe-maker turned Baptist, published a ninety-nine-page Grammar of the Punjabi Language in 1812 in Calcutta, then the capital of British India. In 1849 the East India Company’s army occupied the sovereign state of the Punjab, the land of my ancestors. The Punjab came under the control of the British Crown government in 1858. Seven years earlier John Newton of the Ludhiana Christian Mission in eastern Punjab had published the first-ever Punjabi translation of The New Testament, entitled Anjeel (after the French – évangile), along with a new Grammar of the Punjabi Language. The three-pronged process of politics, religion and linguistics was in full swing, though the African formula of the Bible and the Land had not been charted exactly in India. The religious conversion was negligible and the linguistic one was enormous. The British left India in 1947 dismembering the Punjab, but English still rules there; so much so that the Punjabi syntax, now mirroring the English sentence structure, is changed forever. With the steam locomotive came the colonial locomotive that was full of a new class of western-oriented Indian gentlemen, better known as baboos. Careerists – the offspring of Lord Macaulay’s agenda of educating Indians to craft a nation of petty clerks – soon learnt to take pride in attaining glibness in English. Lord Macaulay had said that ‘a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India’. In that belief, Indian schoolchildren of future generations were made to cram Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds…’, Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ and Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, ignoring their own linguistic and literary heritage. The loss was total. There was a blessing in disguise, however. Thanks to English, a window on the world of knowledge opened. The Punjabis studying abroad in the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London and California established contact and interaction with Western thought. In the early twentieth century Puran Singh (1881-1931), the poet, was writing on Nietzsche in Punjabi; Kahan Singh (1861-1938), the great lexicographer, was collaborating with Macauliffe (1837-1913), on the English translation of the Sikh scriptures for his six-volume magnum opus The Sikh Religion; Dharam Anant [Singh], the Greek and Sanskrit scholar, worked on Plato, and Santokh Singh (1892-1927) introduced Marx in Punjabi. Two collections of Puran Singh’s poetry, and Dharam Anant’s treatise on Plato and Sikhism were published in London by J.M. Dent and Luzac. Mulk Raj Anand moved in the Bloomsbury literary group. Khushwant Singh, Ved Mehta and Zulfikar Ghose made their mark on English literature in the latter half of the last century. II On this sundry background of gain and loss, I started writing at the age of twenty in my own language Punjabi, which I had learnt simultaneously with English. I cut my literary teeth in a real Punjabi milieu. My father, a carpenter turned photographer and communist trade unionist, wrote poetry as well. My mother was illiterate. So my home language remained unadulterated. I rarely write poems in English. The ones I have written were for my loved ones who did not know my language. When I translate such poems into Punjabi, I put the appendage sheepishly – ‘translated from English’. Of course Punjabi is my mother language. I think, feel and dream in it. I live in it and I will die in it. No wonder, working with English poets, I could translate only one fourth of my original poems into English. Kundera, in his novel Testaments Betrayed, sympathises and bemoans Leoš Janáček’s determination to write his operas in Czech, thus limiting his audience. I feel that I am of his tribe. The word for ‘translation’ in Punjabi is anuvaad. It is derived from Sanskrit Anu, meaning: which follows, close, near, corresponding, at the same time; and vaad is the idea behind a sound. The sound is the uttered word. The written word is silent. The poetic creative process can be defined in so many ways. Maybe the idea underlying the word anuvaad equally applies to the birth of a poem. Here an imagined reality takes shape in words. Perhaps my most recent poem written in English could relate that experience. To Father As you taught me to write the first letter of Gurmukhi – the Punjabi script holding my nervous hand in yours You taught me to hold the camera to focus on faces in the pupil of the eye and to press the button holding my breath As if it were a gun loaded with bullets of life.