Heaven, Hell and Five Books
Ma Jian, in a conference on ActivistHumanities at SOAS, University of London last week, said that Tiananmen made a writer out of him. And travelling 10,000 miles after the event made him a Chinese. When you see and feel atrocities around you, there is no other option but to pick up the quill and write, he said. Something drives you. A force. You reach out to yourself and the world reaches out to you. Thus writing happens. He also said how normalization happens: surreptitiously. Before you realize, things have changed. People around you have morphed. Isn’t something similar happening in India–social engineering at a grand scale? Before we realize…] Here is Ma Jian, on his favourite titles and themes from Chinese dissident literature: ——————————————- Why did you choose these books to make a set of five? What common themes or perspectives do they share? When I was thinking about this yesterday, I realized that the history of Chinese literature has often been shaped from outside of its society – by exiled writers and thinkers. From [3rd century BC Chinese poet] Qu Yuan to Confucius, the Tang dynasty to the Qing dynasty, right up to modern novels today, you find that those authors who in the end became central to Chinese culture were at the time writing from outside of their country – exiled, pushed out or banned. Would it be fair to call them dissidents? More or less. In their contemporary society, they couldn’t exist [be published] – that was only possible after they died. In their times, they were exiles like me. I think they had to be exiles before they could return into the midst of Chinese tradition. What advantage is there to writing about China from the outside? It’s precisely because I have left China that I understand China better. I see more facets of China, and have better information about it. I don’t know if writers inside China can climb the great firewall [of internet censorship], for instance – and their information influences the way in which they think. In China, your understanding of history and of the wider world is very different. So I think I understand China better from England, because I see more than one side to the story and know how unfree it is. Writers inside China would respond that you haven’t lived there for over two decades, and don’t understand how much has changed. I don’t think they understand me, because it’s like I don’t exist in China. If you search for my name on the Internet there, it doesn’t exist [because it’s censored]. I’m a zero. So maybe they think I’m not important. Specifically, it was only in 2011 that I was forbidden to go back to China at all. Before that, I went back there every year. I even bought a flat in Beijing. But the police were very strict with me, and controlled who I could see. I was forbidden to meet Liu Xiaobo during the Olympics. I’m one of the so-called “sensitive individuals”. Do you write principally for a Chinese or English audience? The main reader I write for is still Chinese. I’m constantly thinking how my books could be published in China [where they are mostly banned], even if they were censored or changed. Red Dust and The Noodle Maker were both published in China, but under a different name and heavily censored. I write all of my books in Chinese, and they are then translated into English. I think that if a foreigner reads a Chinese novel, he or she can gain an entirely new experience of life from his or her own. To understand a different culture is like to understand a different language – you gain a lot of new wisdom. Tell us about your first book, Li Sao or The Lament by Qu Yuan, from the “warring states” period of ancient Chinese history. From my perspective, because I prefer to combine literature with history myself, Qu Yuan’s The Lament was an obvious first choice. If we’re talking about Chinese literature, we must wonder where it all began. Except for The Book of Songs [the earliest collection of ancient Chinese poems], The Lament is the earliest pinnacle of Chinese literature. I don’t know what it’s like in English translation, but it’s movingly written. Qu Yuan was originally an official from the south of China. Then he was banished, because he was criticizing the corruption of the Chu state, and became a dissident. He led a double life, and finally he committed suicide. He felt his life had no meaning. His country, his system, his people had all forgotten him. From the very top, step by step he fell to the bottom. You could say he experienced all the suffering of Chinese society. The Lament is the story of Qu Yuan’s life, his autobiography. From this poem, you can see the changes in Chinese society, the people’s struggle, and the sorrow and despair of everyday life. The more he experienced – of both heaven and hell – the more mature he became. And what he was opposing in China at his time was more or less the same as the problems in today’s China, such as corruption of the leadership. Criticising China from the outside, his situation has some similarities with your own. I think the story of Qu Yuan is quite possibly the story of all genuine, non state-approved Chinese authors. Your next choice is the famous Romance of the Three Kingdoms, set in the 3rd century. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms only became a book a thousand years after the events which it describes. You could say that its story is the story of all China, passed down from father to son. It is one of China’s four great classical novels, which also include the Journey to the West. But only with Romance of the Three Kingdoms did old Chinese stories really become Chinese literature. It’s also beautifully written. A reader can harvest a lot of history and knowledge from this book, because it chronicles all aspects of China. You can discover in it the entirety of the Chinese character, ancient and modern. All Chinese people today can find themselves inRomance of the Three Kingdoms, whether you are rich or poor, old or young. For example
Ingeborg Bachmann & Paul Celan: Herzzeit/Heart’s Time, A Correspondence
Paul Celan was born in 1920 in Bucovina, Romania. He became one of the most prominent 20th century poets. Celan committed suicide in Paris, in 1970, before turning 50. Ingeborg Bachmann was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria. She wrote poems, libretti, novels and is considered one of the most talented German – Austrian writers of the 20th century. Bachmann died in rather strange circumstances in a fire in Rome, in 1973. She was 47 years old. The love affair between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan constitutes one of the most dramatic chapters of literary history after 1945. The respective backgrounds of the lovers who came together in May 1948 in occupied Vienna could not have been more different: she, the philosophy student daughter of an early Austrian member of the NSDAP; he, a stateless German-speaking Jew from Czernowitz who had lost his parents in a concentration camp and was himself a survivor of a Romanian labour camp. It is from this irreconcilable difference that Paul Celan developed his role as a Jewish poet writing for German readers and his high standards for poetry in German after the Jewish catastrophe. For Ingeborg Bachmann, who had already confronted the most recent past of Germany and Austria, it became a new impulse – to spend her life fighting the danger to forget, and to champion Celan’s work. Both this difference and the striving to resume the dialogue – precisely because of that difference – characterize their letters, from the first gift of a poem in May/June 1948 to the last letter of 1967. Writing formed the focal point in the lives of both correspondents… For both, however, writing – including letter-writing – was no easy matter. The struggle for language and the conflict with the word assume a central role in the correspondence. Time and again, there are references to unsent letters: some of these were failures and hence discarded; some were kept, and appear between the others as documents of doubt… the phrase ‘You know’ [Du weisst or Du weisst ja] often stands in for a direct statement, and telegrams or short letters often promise longer letters, which do not always come… Silence, in some cases a source of torment for one of the two parties and in others maintained by a tacit agreement, is an important element throughout the six phases of their correspondence… Between the weeks spent together in Vienna and the last of the 196 documents – letters, postcards, telegrams, dedications and a page of conversation notes – these events are: Celan’s departure from Vienna to travel to Paris in June 1948; the meeting at the conference of Gruppe 47 in Niendorf (their last for several years); the resumption of the love affair after a conference in Wuppertal in October 1957; Bachmann’s encounter with Max Frisch in the summer of 1958; and, finally, the intensification of Celan’s mental crisis in late 1961 following the climax of the Goll affair, instigated by Yvan Goll’s widow with accusations of plagiarism. The first phase, the time of their encounter in Vienna, has a central document, Celan’s dedicatory poem, ‘In Agypten’. ‘Splendidly enough,’ writes Ingeborg Bachmann to her parents on 20th May 1948, ‘the surrealist poet Paul Celan’ has fallen in love with her. 3 days later Celan sends her this poem with a dedication (‘Vienna, 23 May 1948. To the meticulous one, 22 years after her birthday, From the unmeticulous one’) in a book of Matisse paintings. ———————————————————- ‘In Egypt’ For Ingeborg You should say to the eye of the strange woman: Be the water. You should find in the stranger’s eye those you know are in the water. You should bring them from the water: Ruth! Naomi! Miriam! You should adorn them when you lie with the stranger. You should adorn them with the cloudy hair of strangers. You should say to Ruth and Miriam and Naomi: Look, I’m sleeping with you! You should adorn the strange woman nearest you most beautifully. You should adorn her with sorrow for Ruth, for Miriam and Naomi. You should say to the stranger: Look, I slept with them! [translated by Stephen Lloyd Webber. http://stephenlloydwebber.com/2011/03/ten-translations-of-paul-celan-poems/] Letter from Bachmann to Celan, Vienna, Christmas 1948. NOT SENT. Dear, dear Paul! Yesterday and today I thought a great deal about you – or about us, if you will. I am not writing to you because I want you to write again, but because it gives me pleasure and because I want to. I had also planned to meet you somewhere in Paris very soon, but then my stupid and vain sense of duty kept me here and I did not leave. What does this mean anyway – ‘somewhere in Paris’? I don’t know anything, but I do think it would have been lovely somehow! Three months ago someone suddenly gave me your book of poems as a gift. I didn’t know it had come out. That was so… the ground was so light and buoyant beneath me, and my hand was trembling a little, just a very little bit. […] I still do not know what last spring meant. – You know me, I always want to know everything very precisely. – It was lovely – and so were the poems, and the poem we made together. Today you are dear to me and so present. That is what I want to tell you at all costs – I often neglected to do so during that time. I can come for a few days as soon as I have time. And would you want to see me? – One hour, or two. Much, much love! Yours Ingeborg Celan to Bachmann, Paris, 26 January 1949 Ingeborg, Try for a moment to forget that I was silent for so long and so insistently – I had a great deal of sorrow, more than my brother could take from me,
All The Shared Experiences Of The Lived World II
[This is the second and concluding part of the conversation between R. Sivakumar and Parvez Kabir on art practice and its history.] ————————————————————- 1. Shiv da, in our last conversation you have told us about the role Santiniketan has in defining your works and thought. Let’s begin this conversation with the opposite idea; on the role your 1997 NGMA curation, ‘Santiniketan: Making of a Contextual Modernism’ had in defining the place of Santiniketan in the history of Modern Indian Art. If I am not wrong, you are the first Art Historian to present Santiniketan as a movement rather than a school. What are the reasons for such a reading? R.S.K.: I had been looking at and studying the work of the Santiniketan masters and thinking about their approach to art since the early 80s. The more I looked at them the more it became clear that the practice of subsuming them under the Bengal School was misleading. This happened because early writers were guided by genealogies of apprenticeship rather than their styles, worldviews, and perspectives on art practice. Although this became clear to me early in my study, I did not put my thoughts together until I was asked to curate an exhibition for the NGMA. It was one of the several exhibitions they had planned to mark the 50th year of independence and one of the very few that actually was realised. It gave me a chance to put my reading to test by presenting it in the form of a curated exhibition rather than as an inadequately illustrated text. Luckily many of the interested viewers responded to it positively and many thought that they had overlooked Santiniketan’s contribution not having seen it in any strength. But it would not be entirely true to say I was the first to present Santiniketan practice as a separate art movement rather than as a sub-group within the Bengal School. Benodebehari and K.G.Subramanyan had at least implicitly argued for such a disjunction. May be I was the first to argue for such a disjunction more directly. Putting the works of the major Santiniketan artists together and presenting their work in fairly large numbers also should have helped the viewers in gaining a clear and comprehensive picture of their achievements and differences. More significantly, having put to rest the 40s and 50s attempt to dock onto internationalist modernism, it perhaps simply came at a time the Indian art scene was more prepared to respond to the kind of art the Santiniketan artists had produced and its underlying perceptions. I am not sure, however, if everyone noticed the distinction I drew between Santiniketan as an art movement and Santiniketan as a school very clearly. There was both a Santiketan movement and a Santiniketan school, but these are two different things. The movement was shaped by the practices of the masters, chiefly Nandalal, Benodebehari, Ramkinkar and Rabindranath. Their art practices were interrelated but did not stylistically converge. They were linked more by concerns and as participants in a discourse to which each contributed in a different manner. They themselves saw this very clearly but many who wrote about them did not. They either plumped for Nandalal and Benodebehari, or for Ramkinkar and Rabindranath; one pair representing a traditionalist position and the other a modernist position. I am not suggesting that there are no differences between them but that they saw themselves as co-authors of an art scene being essayed around shared issues, complementing each other and expanding their concerns and reach rather than at war with each other. Nandalal acknowledged Benodebehari and Ramkinkar as artists of the first order among his students; they in turn saw him as a seminal mentor. Rabindranath too valued Nandalal’s evaluation of his work and declared when his paintings were well received in the West that the art of Santiniketan was getting recognized. Their regard for each other should not be mistaken as mere courtesy shown towards each other as denizens of a civilized community. They were at least as clever as those of us who see them as divided into conservatives and moderns and were not blind to the differences between them. They saw each other as necessary fellow travellers who collectively enriched the scene, and believed that a tradition is built upon differential evolution rather on unmitigated sameness. A movement always allows more latitude than a school. The Renaissance allowed Giotto and Cimabue, Masaccio and Fra Angelico, Botticelli and Piero della Francesca, and Leonardo, and Michelangelo and Raphael and Titian to co-exist and define a trajectory guided by a community of shared but variable values. A school on the other hand lasts only as long as similarities count more than shifts. One is founded on ideas and is held together by evolution; the other by the specificities of studio practices and beaks down as soon as these change. Thus the schools of Perugino and early Raphael, Giorgione and early Titian lasted only as long as Raphael and Titian upheld the studio practices of their masters. A movement is based on engagement with ideas or issues; a school is based on the perpetuation of a style. Santiniketan like the Renaissance was a movement with schools within it. But unlike in the Renaissance the issues that exercised them were not primarily aesthetic or limited to the issue of art language though these were very important. They were more exercised about the relation of art to cultural antecedents and of art to its time and place, to its historical and ecological location. While in the Renaissance the artists subsumed their other interests to issues of language in Santiniketan it was the opposite. This perhaps had much to do with the different historical contexts within which they evolved. Nandalal was the leader of both a movement and a school. And how the two interweaved is something that waits to be studied. And in that sense the larger history of Santiniketan remains to be
All The Shared Experiences Of The Lived World
[R. Siva Kumar is one of the most revered living historians of Modern Indian Art. A singular authority on the Santiniketan School and its tradition, Siva Kumar is also widely known for his works on living masters like K.G.Subramanyan, A.Ramachandran, K.S. Radhakrishnan and Jogen Chowdhury. Parvez Kabir was one of the finest young art historians of contemporary India and a former student of Siva Kumar–here, in conversation with him on his life and work. This is one of Kabir’s rare and unpublished conversations before he breathed his last this October in rather tragic circumstances. HUG publishes the first of the two-part interview.] ——————————————— Parvez Kabir: Shiv da, it is indeed an honour to be able to interview you on your works. Please allow me to begin with the commonest of all questions. When and how did you decide to do Art History? R. Siva kumar: I decided to do art history only at the end of my second year at Kala Bhavana, which is to say at the end of the foundation course when we were required to choose an area of specialization. Like others in my class I had come to Santiniketan with the idea of studying painting and not art history. I was drawn to painting while I was at school and had wanted to become a professional painter. So it was more by accident or force of circumstance rather than design that I opted for art history when the time came to choose. And how did this happen? During my first two years at Kala Bhavana I did enough to be seen as a stubborn and intractable student by most of my teachers. Paradoxically this happened because I was bent on charting an individual course and not because of any attempt to offend or revolt per se. But by the end of the second year my reputation was such I feared losing my seat. Having joined the art college against the advice of my mother who believed I was inviting starvation upon my self by seeking to be an artist I was eager to keep my seat in Kala Bhavana. And I thought the only way to ensure this was to take shelter under art history since my teachers there were generally more accommodative and convinced about the seriousness of my interest in art. However, my efforts to become an artist did not end with this. I actually tried to do my masters in painting at Baroda. But this did not materialize. Prof, Ratan Parimoo who was the dean then was more interested in seeing me join the art history department. My itch to paint subsided gradually only after I became a fulltime teacher of art history. P.K: You studied in Santiniketan in the late seventies. How was the academic situation back in those days? We know that Kala Bhavana always valued the study of Art History, but it rather conceived the subject as a supplement to the practice of Art. Was the department specializedenough in your student days? What kind of a scholarship did it initiate you in? R.S.K: Yes, that is right it began that way. Rabindranath wanted artists to be informed so that they would not be merely skilled professionals but artists capable of making informed choices as creative men with theoretical moorings. So while art was discussed and an art historian like Stella Kramrisch was invited to deliver lectures, art history did not become a separate discipline until much later. Even when we were students it was more or less the same, although there was a department by then and the teaching of art history was more formalized than in the early days. In my year there were two students, the other being Anil Singh my classmate from Manipur who did not, however, enroll for masters. And before us the Department had only three students. So the department was still very loosely organized and was still in a very nascent state. It was not specialized by present day standards, but this had its advantages. It didn’t initiate us into anything much except the very basics, and we were not taken on a high-powered conducted tour through art historical scholarship but left free to ramble and explore. P.K: Was it more beneficial as a matter of irony? It is sometimes said that certain students are better helped if they are left on their own. R.S.K: I at least benefited from the situation; because it gave me time to access Visva Bharati’s many libraries and other informal sources of knowledge it offered. Santiniketan was then home to several scholars and its informal milieu allowed one to take benefit of their presence. There were scholars like Sisir Kumar Ghose, Asin Das Gupta, Kalidas Bhattacharya and Anjan Shukla on the campus and it was not difficult to rub shoulders with them if one wanted. Visiting scholars also came from outside, either to participate in symposiums or to deliver lectures. That among them were Susanne Langer, Max Black, Richard Wollheim, P.F. Strawson, J. P. Mohanty, Amartya Sen, A.L. Basham, Shambu Mitra, Richard Gombrich, K.N. Raj, D.C. Sirkar, Kamleshwar Bhattacharya, Sarasai Kumar Saraswati, and Richard Soloman etc. would give you a sense of the range and quality of the intellectual stimulus that was on offer. May be this was small compared the fare on offer in large urban centres today but being a small community the interaction was often more intimate. And combined with the slow pace of life it gave one time to ruminate and internalize. Interactions with a few fellow students from other departments and young staff members of the university supplemented and amplified these exposures further. My teachers were thankfully liberal and as I mentioned they allowed us a fair amount of intellectual freewheeling. This allowed me to take some interest in related fields like literature, philosophy and psychology. P.K: It is quite curious to see a certain similarity between your scholarship and Kala Bhavana’s original pedagogic aims. We know that Kala Bhavana always pursued an all-round