“सच्ची कला चक्कर में डालती है”: An Exchange with Shiv Prasad Joshi
The poet and the essayist Shiv Prasad Joshi has recently written an essay in Pahal about the wellsprings of writing (http://pahalpatrika.com/frontcover/getrecord/321), on the question of holding a perspective and on modes of enunciation. In the essay he has placed front and centre certain ways and tendencies by which art can speak to its audience with honesty and purpose, especially in a time that is uncertain and fuzzy. This conversation with him arises out the concerns he expresses in the essay. _________ Dear Shiv-ji, Namaste. It was really nice to converse with you today. Once again, let me tell you how much I enjoyed your most perceptive observations in Pahal, a collage of thoughts with certain very important threads weaved within. Let me begin by commenting on the very title of the essay: कौन किस सतह से बोलता है. The word ‘satah’ immediately will remind your readers of Muktibodh for obvious reasons. But as we read the essay, it seems to me that ‘satah’ is used in dual senses and sometimes they fuse. One, in the sense of a vantage point, or a level; a sense of understanding and comprehending not only our times but also a sense of having courage (“क्योंकि सुखी नालियां बची रह गयी है और सहस सतह पर आकर किसी गेंद की तरह टप्पे खाता रहता है”). So, the position one takes in life and forms perspective is a matter of a keen sense of perception; but it has also to do with courage and forthrightness, to say things that need to be said. The other meaning of ‘satah’ which I got is a powerful sense of the aesthetic ( musical value, rhythmic quality of life and living). Also perhaps to have a sharp awareness of the uncanny, dark, and convoluted things that lurk in our midst? Your initial choices of Kundera, Kafka and Hemingway show that to me. All three are remarkably honest with life and not afraid to relate the aesthetic to the difficult encounters of life. Also, all of them are highly imaginative artists, needless to say. kalpana and vastvikta (yatharth) must be represented as real, as they do in their art. The fusion becomes too real, ‘the underlying real’ for the reader–as you say later. This you also call: रचना का संघर्ष—the struggle of the composition. Am I thinking on the right track? Best, Prasanta *** नमस्ते प्रशांतो जी, मुझे आपके नाम का उच्चारण कैसे करना चाहिए. ये ठीक से समझ नही आ रहा है इसलिए प्लीज़ गुस्ताख़ी माफ़ करिएगा. आपने इस लेख को सराहा. बहुत ध्यान से और बहुत करीने से पढ़ा. मैं इस बात से अभिभूत तो ही हूं और ये मेरे लिए हार्दिक संतोष की बात भी है लेकिन इससे बढ़कर मैं इस बात का कायल हूं कि आपकी रीडिंग कितनी सूक्ष्म और मर्म तक जाने वाली है. गद्य का ऐसा विलक्षण पाठ बहुत कम दिखता है. ख़ैर.. फिलहाल तो दो चार बाते हैं. जो आपके मेल के जवाब में तो नहीं हैं लेकिन इस लेख के पीछे दो चार चीजें हैं- एक सांगीतिक मूल्य, दूसरी एस्थेटिक इन्टेंशन, और तीसरी वेटलेसनेस, भारहीनता और एक और चीज़ है वो है आख़िर रचना क्यों. वहीं से शुरू होती है बात. ये कोई क्रम नहीं है और इनके साथ अन्य राईटिंग मूल्य भी जुड़े हुए हैैं. मैं ये भी बताना चाहता था कि हम अभी बहुत अच्छे पाठक बनने से बहुत दूर हैं. हिंदी के संबंध में ख़ासतौर पर. और पाठक ही नहीं, एक अच्छे दर्शक, श्रोता के रूप में भी हमें विकसित होना चाहिए. हिंदी में देखता हूं कि एक दीवार से दूसरी दीवार तक आना जाना रहता है. हम टकरा रहे हैं, ये भी हमें नहीं दिखता, महसूस तो क्या करेंगे. बेशक अंग्रेजी भाषा के पास हैरी पॉटर का नैरेटिव है लेकिन हिंदी ने तो अपने लिए वो गनीमत भी नहीं बनायी है. मिसाल के लिए हमारे यहां जो सत्यजित राय का रचना संसार है, इतनी विपुल संपदा. संगीत, कथा, सिनेमा, चित्र. वो आज कहां है किसके पास है. और हिंदी इन नायकों के पास जाने से कतराती है. मुक्तिबोध ये कोशिश कर रहे थे, उन्होंने किसी वजह से ही गुरू रवीन्द्र का नाम लिया था. रघुबीर सहाय के पास ऐसी कोशिशें थीं. जो उनके बाद असद ज़ैदी और मंगलेश डबराल में नज़र आयीं. विष्णु खरे, विनोदकुमार शुक्ल और वीरेन डंगवाल के यहां भी वे चीज़ें बेशक देखी जा सकती हैं. आज की चुनिंदा कवयित्रियों और कवियों में भी वे पोएटिक सतहें हैं. असल में कला बहुत नीचे बैठी रहती है. न दिखना और धूमिल रह जाना उसका एक ख़ास लक्षण रहा है. ये एक ऐसी सतह है जो मैं समझना चाहता हूं. सच्ची आवाज़ें वहीं से आती हैं. लेकिन वे कितनी कम है प्रशांतो जी. और कितनी दूर से आती हुई…धुंधली सी…! हो सकता है ये बातें आगे पुनर्विचार की मांग भी करें. फिलहाल मैं अभी इस पर इतना ही कहूंगा और अगले कुछ रोज़ में आपको थोड़ा और विस्तार से लिखने की कोशिश करूंगा. थैंक्स. अपना ख़्याल रखिएगा. सादर शिव *** Dear Shiv-ji, Prashanto, as you say, is fine. So, do not worry about it. Thank you for the links and the updated version of your essay. I am reading all of them with interest. Thanks also for illuminating the latent and underlying sources from which the concerns about art and politics arise. I could see one of your prime concerns is to address the fundamental issue about the act of writing itself; the urge to record and create. From your previous response, the nature of the quest becomes even clearer. I would like to know more about the term ‘weightlessness’ though in the context of the quest. This sense of restiveness binds the two of us. The inability to fathom the cacophony that surrounds us and these blurry and often clever moves by our interlocutors disturb us. This relentless urge to remain relevant, the fear of being forgotten that marks our time cannot be explained in terms of mere self -consciousness and acute narcissism. Its corrosive power eats the soul. It destroys all relationalities by constantly disguising the sources of our own selves–what you call धूमिल रह जाना. Are we also not implicated in ushering
Letter to a Student
Dear Iqra, I have seen you in classes and in the Arts Faculty corridors. Yesterday I read your helpless and yet immensely brave note after being attacked on the North Campus of Delhi University in broad daylight, simply for being a Muslim woman in hijab, as you wrote. It took me back to February 2017 when I was attacked in a similar manner on campus, not very far from where you were attacked yesterday. The legal case for that is still on and I receive calls from the authorities to depose before them from time to time. To be absolutely honest, I am just an ordinary teacher who had been on the road that bisects Ramjas College and Old Law Faculty that fateful day purely by instinct and in solidarity. I was not and am not an activist unlike many of my colleagues at the university who are far more conscious, and politically far more astute and courageous. That February afternoon I was just standing on the footpath at a demonstration and suddenly received a heavy punch on my head out of nowhere. In a split second—and it is impossible to tell whether it was a conscious decision or merely an instinct—I retaliated with a punch. And then I felt a torrent of punches and kicks all over me. I was being choked with my own scarf. I realized much later that I had been dragged quite a distance even as I was beaten. Genuinely helpful and far more daring colleagues and students came to my rescue at that time. You, Iqra, are far braver since you also mobilize and take active part in campus and national politics along with your studies. Besides, as a woman and as a Muslim, you are at a completely different level of social and political vulnerability today than where I was and am, as a privileged teacher working within the metropolitan academic system. Yet I thought I will write this letter to you. For two reasons. One, to tell you that your ordeal actually starts now. See, this your anger, sadness, helplessness and resolve—this confused yet resolute state of mind will be only yours to stay with you. The personal side of it will never go away as you rightly say. Yesterday’s incident will form you, like the many incidents in the past few years that are constantly forming and re-forming our ever malleable selves. The question of solidarity is a tricky one though. The experience of being physically assaulted or psychologically lynched by an irate and irrational mob leaves a lasting impression. It alters our perspective on reality and gives real clarity about people whom we call and think of as friends and fellow beings. Your real test, Iqra, is not as a victim of an assault but actually lies beyond the experiential nature of the trauma that you are now undergoing. It is to transform that experience of pain and resolve into thinking, analyzing and acting much later, many days after yesterday’s incident. The rest of the test will unfold gradually as you will see your immediate ordeal is, in fact, a long and lasting battle of attrition. This battle of attrition will often be exhausting and despairing. It may also be boring. But our steeling of resolve is tested only when we act with and mobilize groups who are not paranoid in the long run. I am not talking about being an even-handed pragmatic humanist who will skirt the issue for his whole life and be a chameleon, of course. But I am talking about staying clear of equal and opposite, paranoid and angry, reactions. Reaction is not political action. This brings me to a second and related point. Many who are now championing you may not be there for you in the long haul. Not because what they now say is untrue. But because life will go on and they will have to take care of their own matters and their own little ways of living, exactly as you and I would do. Indeed, everyone is with you now, as they were with me in February 2017. But many left me at the slightest opportunity without any verification of truth. Why? Because most people ‘feel empathy’ at the level of sociability. And most also show righteous anger in that same manner. Actually, most people feel secure in performing camaraderie and being safe themselves. Some people who rally around one most vocally and visibly in a time of assault begin to fade into the horizon when another call beckons. That is not the real test of solidarity. Solidarity is a strange word, perhaps coming with an intuitive sense of being with solid and steadfast comrades who are lovingly together for a collective and visionary political utopia. Solidarity burns slow, through long nights of misery and steely resolve. Solidarity is not always politically correct, but politically daring. See, I am rambling Iqra. This is the problem with teachers! But I came to write this note to you not as a teacher really. I felt this urgent, if illogical, need not just to assure you of the solidarities that you must take strength from, but also to strike a small note of caution about solidarities that may become less visible, suddenly or slowly, as life goes on and other things happen. It is perhaps a good lesson that comes out of being assaulted, that no solidarity may be taken permanently for granted. I wish you to keep this at the back of your mind, not to be suspicious of the hundreds who will rally around you now at all, but so that you may continue to find strength in your own resolve and in those who stick around (there will be many) when the field empties of the hordes you may see now. From what I gather in your spirited yet sensitive response yesterday, you possess that courage and conviction. Hold on to it! It was only this that I tried to
Inside and Outside of Time (अधूरी बातें )
Adhoori Baten (Click for the Full Essay in Hindi). HUG talks to Shubha, with reference to her reflective essay अधूरी बातें, on Time and Memory. _______________ HUG: Though your reflections in this composition flow from one thread to another, all sections, including the digressions, are woven into a tapestry. This is a weaving that I have often observed in your prose pieces. Here, I would like to talk about a seaming with Time. Time can be a prisoner, shackled and bound, but it also reserves the potential to be free, since its one end is always open and free—एक छोर खुला रहता है. Following this assertion, right at the outset, you hail time as limitless, unbounded (असीम), but then also as changing and transformative (सतत परिवर्तनशील). The first seems to indicate a geological, cosmological time, while the second leads to an identifying and measuring of time (शिनाख्त), and also its structuring (सांचे में ढालना) that eventually brings it to a visibility (पुनर्रचना, दृश्यमान)that is closer to historical time. How can the two things happen simultaneously? Shubha: See, what you call historical time, lived time, is often not enumerated and visibilized. Think of our freedom movement. How much do we know of the hardships, humiliations and inner fights? Much is still shrouded, since what we get are vignettes. All true yes, and yet only vignettes. The knowledge system through which we filter that time period is refracted via a methodologically subjective and perhaps even Western ways. With other methods, some of them doggedly indigenous, the same can be said. Often history misses the power of time—the zeitgeist-युगीन सच्चाई, which it bypasses. This part is complicated. A slice of time has at least two or more sides to it—पक्ष और विपक्ष. Can we measure its wholeness? Are humans equal to such a task? Appreciating time is at best, a divided and fractured possibility and in that sense, time remains open-ended and limitless. And yet we must keep measuring and keeping track of the predicament that time commands. Say, women’s history in a certain time period: her voice, tone, anxieties, force, her sharp criticality and her collective thought and action, these we can keep track of. Movements of resistance are often overlaid upon glaring elisions. How are we to capture that time, a time that precludes and forestalls? Here we are attempting to splice open duration in order to make it enumerable. This second effort cannot avoid histories. HUG: In this context of identification and structuring of time and also with reference to the question of labour, you also refer to trade unions. Shubha: Well, the trade unions have often debated and fought for a certain kind of time: the time of labour. They have often argued for a stipulated period of time for the worker, say 8 to 10 hours and so on. This is the time without, the measurable, quantifiable time within which questions of labour law and so forth are invoked. These are significant watersheds. But there is another kind of contiguity between labour and time. The relationships within the working class, the leisure time, its sense of beauty, the wage earners’ expressions which are also part of a certain time. What about the worker’s children, for instance? Or his health concerns? The feelings and anxieties that he has about his community members? The wholeness of it I mean-परिघटना. One must connect with existence and all existing tribulations. See, the trade union leader functioning within the late liberal climate has turned modern and smart, but is he sensitive and alive to the full social and cultural ambit of the wage earner? I sometimes wonder whether the unions ever were truly alive to human relationships emerging within a certain time-frame? How can one even think of total transformation of the social order without attending to the identification of such time on the part of the unions and such platforms? This has been the story of my life actually, this particular point that you are raising and I can go on and on. HUG:Right. You seem to take us away from individual memory and also from the ossified, repeatable orders and rituals of the collective. But this successful forging of a relationship between subjective individual recollection and communal memory seems to be the order of the day, is it not? We see this in the forging of quick identities around language, organized religion, nation, family and closed ties of loyalty. And all these remain shrouded and penetrated through relentless, conspicuous consumption creating a happy, addled, obedient and genuflecting world. How is one able to even conceive social time or social memory in such a climate? Shubha: I do not see social time distinct from the individual. That kind of decoupling is a mistake. One has always tried to understand and act the conflict, कश्मकश, enacted within the various forces in the social milieu. All kinds of navjagran, rebirth and renaissance dissolve the force of this conflict. These paper over power and the travails of the individual by talking merely about the individual! I mean, what have we done to the fabric of living? We have a mass of enlightened social beings but each one is feudal through and through. This is the primary diktat of the class system in our nation. There is no notion of humanity, and we use that word in lazy, daily recall. That kind of memorialization can only be ossified, alienating each one of us not into melancholy, but into happiness and more bubbling happiness. And thus, we turn more secretive and malignant by deploying memory, without actually visibilizing the hidden facets of time. We are not able to bring together the individual within the social at all, and the latter have remained an epiphenomenon. What might structural change mean unless we attend deeply to relationships? No one even records time and we shout from rooftops about transforming it? It is in this context that I have tried to think about the selection of
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