Letter from Iowa: Sunil Gangopadhyay
15 June, 1964 313 South Capital Iowa City, Iowa U.S.A Sandipan, Right now I am resting beneath a largish tree on the bank of this river. Windy it is. And 5 dozen cans of beer. Been watching this white girl in swimming costume. Occasionally I am mildly kicking her bottom—how does that look visually? I am literally resting in this state. But I am not part of this setting. As soon as I bring my palms closer to my eyes, everything recedes. No woman’s face. No hunger. No thirst. But beer—yes, that is a reality. Have been reclining on the grass for hours actually. Tried at least 5 times to catch this rabbit but failed miserably. I was in love with your letter for a couple of days. Especially the letters marked with the red pencil. I knew pretty well that you will not like my story. I have no illusion of delighting you ever with my prose. This is because you have written some great prose at one point. Not anymore. But the kind of magic you have produced—we are simply not close enough. I cannot write such prose. I will not write such prose. But that kind of prose pulls me irresistibly. That you will be one of my readers makes me tremble. Still I write prose. Mostly for money. I do not recall indulging in prose but for monetary consideration. Once I had written a novel—quite unlikely that it will ever get published. I do not fear you though for my poetry. I write poetry like prose and shall continue to do so. I have no qualms about that kind of a style. Shakti has written some extraordinary lines. Much, much deeper and larger than me—this Shakti. I respect him a lot. But his poems are headless. I cannot write like that and do not want to write like that simply because I do not live that kind of a life. I can relate much more to Utpal. But this, my resting with beer, makes me oblivious to all poetry. There is no poetry, no heart, nothing. Sandipan, why have you not written much of late? What is this thing about occasional prose pieces? This habit of yours has attracted you to the Hungry Hangama—this latest fad. I did forbid you. And you did not trust me. And then you simply distanced yourself gradually. I never stopped Shakti. Shakti is greedy. Utpal too has taken that route. But I knew that you were not greedy. I have often shared a bed with you, stood in the same shadow while walking in the sun. I know very well the contours of my own greed. And therefore, I could instinctively feel that your greed is less than mine. I became deeply uncomfortable, generated some strong aversion to this new phenomenon. I had always felt that to compose in the English language in order to earn cheap accolades in the West is the worst possible form of greed and narcissism. This feeling has deepened this time here, at Iowa. Would you ever like to be an object of curiosity and pity to the outsider? I have met some Hungry wallahs here—it is these that drive them at the bedrock. Every single day I receive some invitation or the other to write in English. I have refused. Steadfastly. There are 7 crores of potential Bangla readers for me. Much more than French and Italian. I am just doing fine. I write poetry and have no intention to translate my sensibilities. If you wish to access my thoughts in English—do translate me. Happily. I had officially come here to do this kind of mutual back-patting. So far I have resisted that lure. But the real problem with Hungry is not English. The Bangla is even worse. They try shortcut stuff—the idea is to taste readymade fame by abusing and slighting others in the trade. I hope you do not end up really thinking that Malay has some writerly stuff in him! I am wondering because in a recent Hindi literary magazine I have a read an effusive piece by you on this Hungry fad. I was rather surprised that a thinker so abstract as you could feel that writings in the Illustrated Weekly merit any real literary discussion! I know the Hungry folks have tried to pit themselves against the Krittibas or Sunil. I could have dismantled that attempt. That I could. But I refrained. I am telling all this to you because I so much value you as a writer and thinker. There is no trick in this my exhortation Sandipan. I did not follow very well the kind of new things that have happened at your end. Why did you send the same letter to four of your friends—us? I could not fully grasp this method. But then again who has given me this right to understand how your mind works! The point is that once I return to Kolkata, I will sleep peacefully, will walk around rather happily fleet-footed. I do not need any literary-andolan. I really wondered why Malay had published my letter. I hope he has not published any truncated version. That will be so out of the context. I have written to him recently: “If you edit sections of the head or tail of my letters and use some fashionable rubbish like threesome dots or some such instead, I shall box your ears and slap you real hard once I return.” The same is true of your letter. Shakti’s and yours and my private linen is being washed in the public. But these are ephemera—really. No one can touch you. And I shall stand by you always. We have fought over many issues, Sandipan. But I have thought about you patiently: we cannot do without you. I cannot. In a manner of speaking you are my obverse—your fragmentary-disjointed character, your errors and your treachery—to all these I aspire. Like a life I
The Speaker as a Listener
Prasanta Chakravarty I remember a bearded, unkempt middle aged character, presumably not from the neighbourhood, who would be a permanent fixture at various seminars held within Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in the mid-nineties. Sometimes he would hop seamlessly from, say, a seminar on “Bengali Literature in South Indian Languages” to “Recent Developments in Neutrino Physics” in the smooth course of a single day. He would primarily be there for free food. And during the summer—for the air-conditioning. The organizers knew about this guest but would indulge him anyway. He created no fuss. Would find for himself a cosy corner in one of the back-rows. And would sometimes even mildly doze off between sessions. I was then pleasantly surprised to see him one evening perorating quite knowledgeably on the shifting fortunes of the Annales school of history to a bunch of research students in one corner of an odd canteen. As I was participating in and witnessing a recent seminar in Delhi, I remembered the face of that dilettante scholar gypsy. There were really some star speakers here, some delightful talks, some powerful questions raised and responded to and yes, some great food and entertainment sessions too! The whole seminar was meticulously and energetically organized: everything went off like clockwork. But I was looking, quite sentimentally perhaps, for the unkempt guy. That is to say, people who would be there for every single session and in the interstices too. Just be there and even doze off if necessary. But be there. I am primarily thinking about the speakers. Many were present for their own paper only or for one day at most. They were present. But what about their presence? In seminars, we go to hold forth. Mostly. To convince others of our views. In the marketplace of ideas, what have we been worrying about lately—that we try to convey and if possible convert by our powerful argumentative and rhetorical skills. That job once conducted, we tend to move on. So, one gets to hear often in human science circles: how come gender was covered, but not caste? Or some variation. Cover ideas! Very ambitious and taxonomic. But what about another kind of contract that we make with the organisers and our fellow spirits in the world of thought—a convivial contract of listening to other ideas? The very word seminar—from seminarium, semen (seed) would refer to a breeding ground, a nursery. Breeding cannot happen alone. We need to partake of that process. There is a texture to each seminar, one which gives it a shape and character. To begin with, there is a vertical axis. It pertains to the slowing down of ideas and the maturing of collective thought within the confines of the hall. As one listens to the first few speakers one gets the basics clear. This is, as a friends says, the 101 aspect of the larger subject at hand. The issues get gradually disentangled. Ideas begin to waft and float around—coagulating here and there in the hall. A semantic form of listening begins. Trends begin to emerge. By the middle of the day, those ideas, the initial ones, have made their way to the dining lounge. We bring our own thoughts, mix and match and wonder how individual unit ideas would travel during the rest of the day. Some happily recount personal tales about other such seminars, convictions and idiosyncrasies of the speakers and try to match their own perceptions and convictions with the currents and cross-currents of ideas. It is not that I am giving a directional shape to the texture of a seminar, but trying to think ,rather, about how ideas gradually build up. This building up takes a more concrete form as we traverse through time. We now get into listening proper, beyond the semantic. This is paradoxically a reduced form of listening. The partakers quickly realize that there is a shuttling between sound’s actual content, it source and its meaning. The language, the techniques of language, the arguments that we so habitually use, suddenly begins to reveal themselves—in unexpected turns and twists. We gradually see the subtle undertones, feel the ‘laughing off’ of a project or sense the circulation of trivial or harebrained ideas. Why was the word ‘reform’ used fleetingly in this way instead of that, we may wonder? Why does a left leaning intellectual frame her arguments around ‘status’ and ‘nation’—and not critique them either, we speculate? What I am getting at is a certain entrenchment via retreat that leads to a kind of subjective relativism in convivial partakings. Every listener hears something different and the sounds, the twitching of the muscles around us and the sighs and smirks perceived: those that scaffold the ideas, get denser and subtler, ever growing. The nature of the claps after each talk tells a story, too. They shine. We take in the spirit. Submerge ourselves. As Anaximenes who, wondering about ‘air’ thought, “As our souls being air, hold us together, so breath and air embrace the whole cosmos in small meetings.” Perception, in small meetings at such breeding grounds, is never purely an individual phenomenon. It partakes in a particular act of sociology—that of shared perceptions. Reduced listening is a phenomenon. Only a sustained form of listening can take us to this objectivity born of inter-subjectivity. For this to happen, each pin drop must be listened to—with utmost care. This is the contract that each speaker implicitly, ideally, makes—with and in a seminar—which they agree to join in. But there is also a material and lateral aspect of the kind of cross-pollination that might happen in a seminar. We go to seminars for selfish reasons—to serendipitously discover titles of books, lines of arguments that startle us and remain with us for years to come, meet new people and hear their deepest beliefs and benefit from them—pure and simple. That self-regarding purpose too gets defeated if we decide to fleetfoot in and out of the arena. Word is soundful and sound is meaningful. The meanings are
Professor Morrie and Revolutionary Literature
Ashim ‘Kaka’ Chatterjee Tuesdays with Morrie disturbed me. This book disturbed me a lot. The story of Professor Morrie Schwartz is distinctive. There is not much of action here. Not too much description of life’s experiences. Colourful characters do not clash with each other in order to create a dramatic situation. What one encounters instead is death—in its full glory—and life arising out of death. Tuesdays with Morrie is a story of an old professor and his not-so-old student. What kind of a man is Professor Morrie? He teaches sociology at Brandies University. Not merely chhatra-dardi or chhatra vatsal—to brand him thus will be saying a lot less about his relationship to his pupils. Students are his life. Naturally his home, the restaurants near his university, the lawns and nooks—all are sites for nurturing a peripatetic world of examined life with his students. His love of books and ideas is infectious. Love of life, even more. He arrives at a class. A hall full of anxious young minds—waiting. But Morrie is silent. For 15 long minutes. First the students are bemused, mild jokes hover around, notes get exchanged, a certain uneasy restlessness pervades. Then there comes a moment of pin-drop silence. Hush. The professor begins. His subject of the day: the influence of silence in human relationships. Why do we get bothered by silence? Wherefore peace in utterance? This is the way the man wins over his students, commands respect and love. He is not as dexterous as his more famous fictional rival in To Sir With Love nor as historically vexed as Coetzee’s Professor Lurie. But Morrie is not against life. Though he cannot manage his steps, he would dance. Not a good singer, he would be immersed in music. Not a particularly skilful swimmer, he would love to go for a dip. His student, who is narrating Morrie’s life, is bringing this world, a cosmos really, into being with utmost care and craft. The university life being over and done with, his students bring Morrie a brief-case, embossed with his name. They embrace—the teacher and his pupils. And part silently. In such a lively man’s life there arrives a terrible tempest. All in a flash. Morrie gets infected with Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS)—a motor neurone predicament. We all are familiar with Stephen Hawking and his encounters with this disease. Not much has been discovered yet about this condition and not much preventive or curative stuff is available yet. But death is imminent. Maximum duration of possible survival is 5 years. In Morrie’s case, it is 2. As Morrie comes out of the diagnostic centre, he notices the busy world going on with its daily activities. As the world refreshes, he withers. Gradual, little, incremental changes are making him give up the small pleasures of life. He discovers in the morning that he can’t fix his car’s brakes—driving as an option is gone. Begins to trip as he walks and therefore requires a walking stick—end of independent walking days. In the locker room, in order to change his outfit, he needs manual help—end of privacy. Appears before his students one morning and announces that he might not finish his quota of coursework that particular semester and so they can opt for other courses or may drop out—end of his secret pride. ALS, the writer tells us, in an evocative phrase, is like a burning candle. It will burn out and melt your nerves into a waxen residue. The process starts from your legs and usually travels up. After a while, you cannot stand on your feet. And then sitting too becomes impossible. Finally, if you are still alive, a rubber tube will facilitate your breathing. And all this, when you are fully conscious of the rapid changes taking place in your body. The professor takes a profound decision: that he will utilize fully the rest of his living days. There is no need to feel embarrassed about the inevitable. Why not make his death a case for research? Is it not worth it to travel the boundaries of life and death and think afresh? With this thought in mind, Morrie begins to disseminate himself to others, to everyone. He gives a clarion call for meetings in his apartment in order to discuss the many variations on death threadbare. Not empathy or sentimentality he needs—but interviews, new connections, telephonic conversations— with an urge to examine life through death is what he would rather like to indulge in during the remaining period of his existence. He walks into TV studios. His student and now a well known newspaper columnist Mitch Albom had promised to keep in touch after they parted upon Mitch’s graduation from the university. He could not fulfil his promise. The rat race got him. Mitch responds now—after 16 long years and they start a new research agenda, like the old times: meeting his professor every Tuesday and thrashing out issues of life in their many hues—Society, Rights, Guilt, Death, Fear, Aging, Greed, Marriage, Family, Forgiveness and so forth. By that time Morrie is unable to conduct his everyday activities. Every Tuesday is downhill. But he is unfazed. He requests in a matter of fact fashion to a guest, “Can you please hold on to this bowl—need to take a piss?” Since he has no other option but to rely on others, he has no qualms or feelings of guilt. When asked in a television show about what bothers him about this dependency, pat comes his reply: “Soon someone has to wipe off my arse.” The final Tuesday was reserved for ‘Adieu’—as a subject of discussion. Only a few words. Morrie breathes his last the Saturday next. Discussion on death and human preoccupation with death is timeless really. Yet it is also historicised in specific circumstances. The sons and daughters of Amrita have not been able to transcend death fully. The idea actually is not to transcend death but to encounter it, as part of our material living.
Political Iconography & the Female Political Leader: The Case of Indira Gandhi, Some Initial Questions
Trina Nileena Banerjee ‘The coming generation will feel extremely proud of the name of Indira Gandhi. They will worship her as the personification of Sita, Lakshmi and Durga. Long live Indiraji,’ ~ Virendra Khanna, General Secretary of National Affairs. [i] From a large portion of the visual, historical and literary material emerging around the National Emergency in India (1975-1977), it could be argued that a strong undertone of religiosity and the sense of a mystical, yet terrifying, female power surrounded the popular perception of Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. Sita[ii], Lakshmi[iii] and Durga[iv], of course, stood for the virtues of chastity, purity, service, prosperity and strength – qualities that were seen to be embodied in Indira’s person during the first years of her government. The influence of religious, especially Hindu religious, iconography had always been a strong determinant in the popular representations of national political leadership in India and had managed to survive from the days of the nationalist struggle into the 1970s, as Christopher Pinney has shown in his book Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India.[v] In an essay called ‘Towards the Space of the Beholder’, Pinney writes: Ramakrishna, as also Swami Vivekananda, initially subjected to photographic regimes, were very soon circulated through the technology of chromolithography – a way of disseminating photos of the gods (bhagwan ke photo) which was more phenomenologically adequate to the task of impressing quasi-divine power. The same would soon also be true of the political pantheon as it merged towards the end of the nineteenth century. Tilak, Gandhi, Ambedkar and numerous others were endlessly photographically documented (many of them by the Bombay based photographer V. N. Virkar), but is as coloured lithographs that they sedimented themselves among the wider populace.[vi] An examination of Indira Gandhi’s representations in popular art during the 1960s and 1970s (as recorded in the prints available in Pinney’s book and various popular cartoons) reveals a continuation of this tradition: an odd visual continuum between the portrayal of godhead and that of political leadership. The element of worship, which had continued to feature prominently in the political and electoral popularity of figures of Indira Gandhi’s stature from the time of Independence, appears to be a strong subterranean current in these popular representations. This strand of religiosity was not a figment of imagination or wishful thinking that emerged from sections of Indira’s loyal coterie, but, arguably, significantly coloured the visual and verbal rhetoric of the dominant political propaganda surrounding her greatness, shaping mass-produced images and popular calendar art, and ultimately putting the final seal on the process of her deification during the nineteen months of the Emergency, when Congress President D. K. Barooah famously claimed “India is Indira, Indira is India.’ Pinney writes in his book about the continuities that existed in the 1960s’ and 70s’ between representations of technological/military advance, political leadership and religious figures: There were also, in the 1960s and ’70s, inevitably a vast number of Indira images; she is shown with Jawaharlal Nehru, with Sanjay, against the national flag. One series, strongly inflected with a Soviet socialist realist aesthetic, depicts scenes from the life of contemporary India within decorative interlocking cogs suggestive of a huge mechanized India. Heroic peasants clutching sheaves of wheat and sickles are juxtaposed with vast hydroelectric projects, the Trombay reactor, heavy engineering works and scenes of high-tech laboratories peopled by whitecoated technicians. Wendy O’Flaherty once commented on the Shivling-like contours of the Trombay reactor, suggesting that a postage stamp that bore its image depicted it within a religious frame. Be that as it may, some Hindu deities have always engaged intimately with modernity. Vishvakarma – a traditional deity of artisan castes – has long been worshipped through special pujas in steel and other factories throughout India…[vii] Impulses towards industrial modernity merged with celebrations of (Hindu) religious tradition the labour-power of ‘heroic peasants’; presiding over these images, yoking together ‘progress’ and the visual grammar of Hindu worship, was the benevolent figure of the then current Prime Minister and the concrete embodiment of the idea of ‘Mother India’. This essay will attempt to examine, through the case of Indira Gandhi, the complex and perhaps perverse imbrications of authoritarian rule, deification, embodiment and femininity in the Indian political context of the 1960s and 1970s. How a female political leader ‘performs her image’ in the post-colonial public sphere and the extra-rational implications of this performance, which tap on to both deep-seated religious and socio-cultural resources for success, would be the primary themes of exploration in this paper. The essay also emerges from my broader investment in a theoretical and historical exploration of women’s relationship to power in the realpolitik, their differential engagements with political violence (not just as victims but also as agents/perpetrators) and their associations with authoritarian/repressive/right-wing regimes and politico-religious movement. The association of a female political leader with perhaps the single-most repressive period in the political history of post-Independence India leads to an inevitable rethinking of the straightforward liberal feminist notion of female political agency as a positive in itself. I am interested in the relationship of this problematic to performance, especially the performance of gender in the public and political sphere. Popular visual representations – for example, the frequently misogynistic cartoons and caricatures in the mainstream media[viii] – of Indira Gandhi that were current during the period of her governance reveal much about the intimate, complex, and sometimes derisive, relationship existing between the iconic female leader and the postcolonial polity she governed. My specific interest is in the relationship of popular critiques, as well as celebrations, of political conservatism to the figure of the exceptionally powerful female. There is, in addition, the difficulty faced by feminists in reading such a figure, one who did nothing historically for the larger interests of marginalized women’s groups, as well as for ‘sisterhood’. This difficulty is addressed by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan in her essay ‘Gender, Leadership and Nation: The ‘Case’ of Indira Gandhi’[ix] in the book Real