एक गुमनाम गुरुकुल—A Nondescript Gurukul
HUG takes an early (and limited) look into Anil Yadav’s book सोनम गुप्ता बेबफ़ा नहीं है—Sonam Gupta is Not Unfaithful (Antika Prakashan, 2017). _____________________ Life oozes in small doses in Anil Yadav’s collection of viewpoints—in his just published book सोनम गुप्ता बेबफ़ा नहीं है—Sonam Gupta is Not Unfaithful (Antika Prakashan, 2017). In its full, frontal grandeur and starkness life circulates, drifts and accrues. We travel. And we expand. Anil is a recorder par excellence of our times; a witness to the rapid changes that have been taking place in the last two decades in the northern parts of India. He is also a cutting raconteur. And in that process of recounting tales, he makes some claims. No claim is abstruse. None taken in vain. Though the whole book is divided into several rubrics, let us just concentrate on two sections—the one on Literature and the other, called Life. Literature The section on literature is about a certain optimism about the profession of the writer and the craft of writing that can only come if one is fully immersed and true to one’s experiences and trustful of one’s interlocutors as a writer. He commands respect foremost through his recordings of life. Everything else is secondary. And Anil makes it clear that instead of blaming the readers and students and the middle class for their backwardness and ennui, it is the writer’s responsibility to create readers and create situations for discussion and debate. There indeed are certain glass ceilings and internecine struggles (खेमों, गिरोहों, उपगिरोहों के युयुत्सु शिबिरों) but there are ways to overcome such limitations. One has to reach the readers directly and without any armour. The readers, especially the young readers of Hindi, are intelligent, sensitive and thoughtful human beings of flesh and blood. They are not to be hoodwinked by abstractions that come from a life that is not experienced. The first thing is to admit that the litterateur is given a very low status by the society. This is bound to happen since literature itself has turned into an auxiliary form of enterprise. Once you come to terms with these realities you are able to free yourself from all expectations of greatness and can simply keep on penning whatever you see and feel. In order to fortify his claims, Anil gives us a few snippets. One such is about Srilal Shukla. Why is Shukla so universally feted? He did not care for this or that camp or ideology. His confidence, right from his initial days of writing, came from, in Anil’s luminous phrase: दीप्त ख़ामोशी (radiant silence). The respect and continuous readership that Raag Darbari enjoys is not because of any literary conscience or some such drivel, but because Shukla could show the readers their own lost battles and misadventures. In the early days Shukla was considered to be an upcountry bumpkin by many established authors of Hindi and his greatest work not even considered a novel proper. The respect that accrued to Shukla over the decades owes less to his craft of satire (which is present, no doubt) but more to the hopes of a million readers whose lives go unnoticed and unrecorded. He breaks the traditional romantic idea of our rural existence and shuns all sentimental flab. The readers have not missed this feature. Indeed the burgeoning readership is a certificate to hope itself. In a similar vein he introduces us to Adam Gondvi who weaves the sharpest of couplets and songs, especially those that are politically searing, like this one: प्लेट में है काजू व्हिस्की गिलास में/ उतरा है रामराज विधयक निवास में. This otherwise tentative and lost soul will time and again return to reality with such clarity that the listener will be simultaneously embarrassed and enlarged immeasurably by the utterances. The reason why the general reader has gone to pulp fiction (in which readers have sought refuge forever anyway!) and accessible versifiers and pop gurus is because the other breed is unable to mirror to them life’s inner dynamics. At least the lugdi (pulp) world is accessible and even gives you some direction in life. Plus those books do not harbor any illusion of a grand vision. And Anil limns the book with his characteristic deadpan sense of humour, of course: ऊपर से आधा किलो का मोटा उपन्यास भी सिर्फ बीस रूपए में मिल जाता है—besides, you get a fat, half a kilogram worth of novel only for Rs.20/-! There is a searing column on Rajendra Yadav of Hans in this section—part anecdote, part reflective. In fact it is less about Yadav who had been hounded by a sexual scandal towards the end of his life. Anil begins by a personal anecdote and presents to us Yadav and himself as two people taking about women, over booze, in the former’s Mayur Vihar apartment. In a matter of fact way Anil lays bare two men who are talking about women. Finally Yadav, albeit in a exaggerated fashion, simply declares that he is a ठरकी बुड्ढा—lascivious old man. Anil ends the first section with a parallel of ठरक in Bhojpuri: हिरस—a kind of beastly, ever-burning sexual urge. With this note he comes to the main argument of the essay: that perversion, sexual domination, rape and molestation is never going to even diminish one bit, let alone be eradicated, unless we come to terms first with what is going on in the minds of men and women in a repressed society like ours. The woman concerned here too played by the false social claims and christened her relationship with Yadav as filial. No law is going to be able to address this attitude. How come the likes of Manto, Chugtai, Ugra, Kashinath Singh, Rajkamal Chowdhury meet life’s stark realties with a certain directness, a rare humour and a purpose that we are unable to do at this point of time? In Anil’s searing words: हमारे लेखक की हालात हिंदी भाषी देहाती महिला से भी गई बीती है जो स्त्री रोग विशेषज्ञ डॉक्टर के
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
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
95 Theses
Charles Bernstein ___________________ I am retiring in 2019, so take this as something of a swan song, or, anyway, duck soup. I leave the remainder of the theses to be filled in by you. Professionalism is a means not an end. Less is more. Professors are better off when they professionalize less and risk extinction when professionalization is primary. Professionalized scholarly writing often seems to play off a list of master-theorists who must be cited, even if the subject is overcoming mastery. A modest proposal: In your next essays and books don’t make any reference to the ten most cited authors in your field. Apply the death of the author to the ones that authorize that idea. Don’t cite authors, become an author. Then undo your own authority. If you write you are a writer. It is as simple as that and no amount of research, findings, conclusions, proposals, projects, and laboratories will change it a whit. Writing is a laboratory for the mind, its experiments are in syntax as much as analysis, arrangement as much as argument. Frame Lock was not built in a day. Tone jam is not a marmalade. Contradiction is closer to truth than consistency so don’t consistently emphasize contradiction. The truth is not the end of the essay but its point of departure. The fragment is more important for criticism today than for poetry. Not fragments: constellations. Positivism is as rhetorical as negativism. Reason abhors a rationalist. Which does not mean anything goes: anything is possible but only a very few things get through that eye of a needle that separates charm from harm. And often what appears as harm has got the charm. We’re better with alternatives to STEM Than when we go on imitating them. A recent Digital Humanities lecture presented both a fount and a font of information about a poem’s unusual digital typeface but not a word about the font’s meaning or ideology or how the visual display affected the interpretation of the poem. This was New Criticism with close reading not of the words of a text but the technology for generating its letters. Distant reading without reading is not reading. Close reading without toggling frames is myopia. Information everywhere but not a drop to drink. The question for macro and distant sociological approaches in the humanities, digital or otherwise, is not just what happens but also so what? and what for? “The fact you tell is of no value, but only the impression.” —Emerson on Thoreau (1862) Criticism, scholarship, and poetry are all fonts of rhetoric. The aversion of rhetoric is an unkind kind of rhetoric. There is no formula for avoiding formulas. Sometimes what appears as unformulated is just new jeans with fashionable rips. Not that there is anything wrong with that. One size doesn’t fit all. (Each to his own goo, be true.) Not interdisciplinarity: non-disciplinarity. (Call it pragmatism.) If we want to emulate the natural sciences let us do by stressing speculation and collaboration (through multiple author essays). Expository writing needs to be balanced by non-expository writing. I don’t want trans-national studies I want non-national studies. Non-national studies would look at language-speaking groups and conversations among languages and across languages not based only on nation states but affinities, immigration, refugees, the displaced and diasporic, the nomadic, the national-non-conforming. Examples would be born-digital arts, poets writing in English irrespective of their national or first language, Yiddish, or to give a more historical example, the Medieval and European cultures approach of David Wallace here at Penn that looks not at discrete national literatures but rather “sequences of interconnected places.” Nothing suits us like our union suits, as the old ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) ad put it. Don’t mourn: unionize. There are no themes, histories, ideologies, ideas, terms, or categories uninflected (uninfected) by the often fractal, fractured, and fraught signifying practices that make them so. Ideas bleed re(a)d blood; the imaginary weeps wet tears. The real is no less so minding the body than embodying mind. Language is never more than an extension of reality. Form and style are not ornamental to meaning. No flapjacks without eggs. Impersonality is the hobgoblin of frightened prose. Autobiography and personal narrative is not a prophylactic against formulaic expression of received ideas. Contentious rhetoric opens dialog more than professionalized prose. But contentiousness as a mode of dominance is tyranny. Denunciation and defamation, even in the name of a good cause, destroys dialog. All professional rhetoric is pre-professional. The real cannot disappear. Even the appearance of disappearance is real. The absence of expressed identity is a form of identity. The expression of identity is, also, a mask. The poetry and poetics I read and write are not a product of the world financial system but of the world semantic system. Whenever you walk on a new road, you can be sure no one has spoilt it yet. —Menachim Mendel (Kotsker Rebbe) Whenever you think you have walked down a new road, you can be sure others have been there first. Try to find and acknowledge them. Feeling superior to the self-righteous makes you that. Taking pleasure in piety is piteous. The good longs for us but we are unworthy. Recently, a dean at my college declined to allow a class for a “diversity” requirement even though the syllabus included poetry in a dozen languages from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa. The dean saiddiversity needed to focus on only one group, one language. Diversity without uniformity is poetry and don’t count. For the colonial mind, decolonization is a new frontier to settle. It never hurts to add a joke. You know the one: three Jews four opinions? What you don’t hear is that two of them, the schmucks, have the same opinion, while the third … To write prose after Auschwitz is barbaric. “Away then with all those prophets who say to the community of Christ, ‘Peace, peace,’ and there is no peace.” My concern is more What is false? than