Panditji, Do You Still Harbour The Same Indifference To The Progressive Cause?
[Balraj Sahni writes to Hazari Prasad Dwivedi. In November 1965. HUG translates from Pahal 93. Our gratitude to Gyanranjan for granting permission to do so and to Udayashankar for presenting these letters in Pahal in the first place. Dwivediji’s reply will follow in the forthcoming installment.] Panditji, We have known each other for more than 25 years now. One result of such intimate knowledge, passing through such a large swathe of time, has been that we can speak to each other in free, straightforward terms and with a certain kind of honesty. Your up-front candidness will also prove profitable to me and other readers. It is with such a hope that I have accepted the Nayi Kahaniya ‘Question & Answer’ invitation. May I put forth my first question with the hope that you will reflect on my respectful appeal? You had seen me for the first time in Santiniketan in July 1937. I had come from Calcutta with your name and a reference from my good friend S. H. Vatsyayan. At that time you were waiting for the completion of the construction of Hindi Bhavan and were staying in another residence. I do not fully remember that dwelling, but it was possibly quite close to Kshiti da’s place—please tell me if I am mistaken. If I can recall and identify the topography and the correct place, I may also be able to bring to mind other important things. When I was given the job, the financial situation of Santiniketan was quite wobbly. I am certain that my appointment, primarily owing to Gurudev’s munificence and your backing, must have had created some stir and occasioned resistance from the managers there. Was there really such an opposition? How did you combat that? Within three or four days of my appointment the Hindi Sabha of Bolpur had organized a Tulsi Samagam and you had made me the sabhapati—the chair—and had sent me there. By then you had realized that my association with Hindi literature, and particularly with Tulsi scholarship, was next to nothing. Did it not occur to you even once that by thus parading my deficiency, I would embarrass Santiniketan and the Hindi Bibhag alike? Why did you have to dispatch me? Why not Chadolaji, who would have been the right person for such an occasion? In those days you were quite well aware that, other than English, I was unable to even speak fluently in any other language, not even my mother tongue Punjabi. Had you had given me some capsule classes, I could still have come across as a reasonably ‘all right’ teacher. But you had assigned to me the BA final year classes that dealt with Hindi novels. Did you think that I would soon realize my shortcomings, learn a lesson and depart from Santiniketan in some haste? Or is it that you thought I would get into the job quicker, correcting my non-competencies? You will recall that when I used to take those classes, you would watch my pain and misery from the windows of Vidya Bhavan. What were you thinking, Panditji? It is my good fortune that your and Bhagavati Prasad Chandolaji’s indulgence had somehow seen me through that particular stretch of time. Still, you must have noticed how my formative, greenhorn years had been shaped and supported wholly by the English literary world. Hindi was no match anyway. I did not even think much of Bangla and Gurudev’s own work. You must have also marked the fact that I considered Urdu literature to be richer than Hindi. Did all this not incense you? If such things did actually infuriate you, why did you not express it? Perhaps this last question would be difficult for you to answer, but don’t you worry; if you can even score 25 percent marks, I shall give you a passing grade (keeping in mind the kind of decorum you had maintained with me in those days). You will remember that a certain progressive movement was beginning to foment during 1937-38. You had no sympathies for that movement. I did not quite understand the reasons for your stance. Perhaps now I can comprehend the basis of your position with a bit more clarity and depth. Actually, the progressive temperament would consider itself validated by cutting itself off from the ancient routes of our cultural trajectories. To be able to do this is often the litmus test of being a progressive. These people would imitate the latest tricks and experiments from the English literary world, but the abject conditions of our country were an obstacle to accepting and proclaiming this fact openly in public. In order to hide this unconscious longing, many who would otherwise call themselves progressives turned to Marxism, though their everyday ways and methods—kriyakalap—were hardly in keeping with any form of Marxism. There was no inclination to boldly and imaginatively depict the lives and misfortunes of the workers and peasants of India, and especially their powerful role in the freedom struggle, on the part of those who sloganeered to strengthen the metaphors of class-difference and class-struggle. No, nothing of that sort happened. In fact, under the guise of Marxism, the grimy, sullied world of our lower classes was ridiculed in the most ugly and perverted ways! Premchand’s story Kafan, some would say written under such progressive motivations, was being hailed a lot during those days. I remember that you did not show any liking for the story and were not at all inclined to consider this tale as the objective manifestation of whatever Premchand stood for. After all these years, I consider it my obligation to declare publicly that you were correct in your evaluation. Kafan is indeed one of Premchand’s minor stories in which he had presented his own countrymen in such a manner that attested to the ways and statements of such India baiters as Ms Mayo and her empire-supporting ilk in England, America and many other Western nations. Here I am also thinking
The Cinema & the Classics
H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] [ The eleven articles that the Modernist poet and novelist H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] wrote for Close Up, a film journal of the early 20th century edited by Kenneth Macpherson, appeared in the journal’s first two years. The first three [reproduced here] appeared under the title ‘The Cinema and the Classics’. They are investigations and celebrations of film art as a new classicism, of a ‘beauty’ wholly submerged by Hollywood film, but revealed in the new German and Russian cinema (of Pabst, Kuleshov, Eisenstein) which is the topic of a number of H.D.’s subsequent Close Up articles. A number of the tenets expressed in the ‘Cinema and the Classics’ pieces echo the ‘Imagist’ aesthetics with which H.D.’s early poetry is associated – spareness, directness, ‘restraint’ – as well as the ‘Hellenism’ which was a central aspect of her poetics throughout her long writing career. The interplay between an aesthetics of formal restraint and one of emotional, spiritual or ‘psychic’ transcendence, between holding back and going beyond, runs throughout H.D.’s film writings. [From an introduction to these articles by Laura Marcus] I [CLOSE UP Vol 1, no 1, July 1927] BEAUTY I suppose we might begin rhetorically by asking, what is the cinema, what are the classics? For I don’t in my heart believe one out of ten of us highbrow intellectuals, Golders Greenites, Chautauqua lecturers, knows the least little bit about either. Classics. Cinema. The word cinema (or movies) would bring to nine out often of us a memory of crowds and saccharine music and longdrawn out embraces and the artificially enhanced thud-offs of galloping bronchoes. What would be our word-reaction to Classics? What to Cinema? Take Cinema to begin with, (cinema = movies), boredom, tedium, suffocation, pink lemonade, saw-dust even: old reactions connected with cheap circuses, crowds and crowds and crowds and illiteracy and more crowds and breathless suffocation and (if’we’ the editorial ‘us’ is an American) peanut shells and grit and perhaps a sudden collapse of jerry-built scaffoldings. Danger somewhere anyhow. Danger to the physical safety, danger to the moral safety, a shivering away as when ‘polities’ or ‘graft’ is mentioned, a great thing that must be accepted (like the pre-cinema days circus) with abashed guilt, sneaked to at least intellectually. The cinema or the movies is to the vast horde of the fair-to-middling intellectuals, a Juggernaught crushing out mind and perception in one vast orgy of the senses. So much for the cinema. (Our ‘classic’ word-reaction will come along in due course.) I speak here, when I would appear ironical, of the fair-to-middling intellectual, not of the fortunately vast-increasing, valiant, little army of the advance guard or the franctireur of the arts, in whose hands mercifully since the days of the stone-writers, the arts really rested. The little leaven. But the leaven, turning in the lump, sometimes takes it into its microscopic mind to wonder what the lump is about and why can’t the lump, for its own good, for its own happiness, for its own (to use the word goodness in its Hellenic sense) beauty, be leavened just a little quicker? The leaven, regarding the lump, is sometimes curious as to the lump’s point of view, for all the lump itself so grandiloquently ignores it, the microscopic leaven. And so with me or editorially ‘us’ at just this moment. Wedged securely in the lump (we won’t class ourselves as sniffingly above it), we want to prod our little microbe way into its understanding. Thereby having the thrill of our lives, getting an immense kick out of trying to see what it is up to, what I am up against, what we all, franc-tireurs, have to deal with. First as I say, amazing prejudice. The movies, the cinema, the pictures. Prejudice has sprouted, a rank weed, where the growth of wheat is thickest. In other words, film that blossom here in Europe (perhaps a frail, little, appreciated flower) are swiftly cut and grafted in America into a more sturdy, respectable rootstock. Take ‘Vaudeville’, for example, a film that I didn’t particularly revel in, yet must appreciate, Zolaesque realism which succeeded admirably in its medium; was stripped (by this gigantic Cyclops, the American censor) of its one bloom. The stem is valuable, is transplanted, but the spirit, the flower so to speak of ‘Vaudeville’ (we called it here ‘Variete’), the thing holding its created centre, its (as it happens) Zolaesque sincerity, is carefully abstracted. A reel or in some cases an artist or a producer, is carefully gelded before being given free run of the public. The lump heaving under its own lumpishness is perforce content, is perforce ignorant, is perforce so sated with mechanical efficiency, with whir and thud of various hypnotic appliances, that it doesn’t know what it is missing. The lump doesn’t know that it has been deprived of beauty, of the flower of some producer’s wit and inspiration. The lump is hypnotized by the thud-thud of constant repetition until it begins to believe, like the African tribesman, that the thump-thump of its medicine man’s formula is the only formula, that his medicine man is the only medicine man, that his god, his totem is (save for some neighbouring flat-faced almost similar effigies) the only totem. America accepts totems, not because the crowd wants totems, but because totems have so long been imposed on him, on it, on the race consciousness that it or him or the race consciousness is becoming hypnotized, is in danger of some race fixation; he or it or the race consciousness is so duped by mechanical efficiency and saccharine dramatic mediocrity that he or it doesn’t in the least know, in fact would be incapable (if he did know) of saying what he does want. He learns that there is a new European importation for instance of a ‘star’; this importation being thudded into his senses for some months beforehand, his mind is made up for him; she is beautiful. We take that for granted. There I agree, the leaven and the lump are in this at one. The lump really wants beauty or this totem of beauty would not be set up by its astute leaders. Beauty. She is beautiful. This time ‘she’ is a northern girl, a ‘nordic’, another word they fall for. A Nordic beauty has been acclaimed and we all
You Will Have To Swim, Mr. Marek !
Marek Kaminski During and after 1970s the Polish underground press drew on experiences of Second World War veterans of Armia Krajowa. After martial law in Poland and the government crackdown on Solidarity, the activities of underground publishing were significantly curtailed for several years. Nevertheless, with the communist government losing power in the second half of the 1980s, production of Polish underground printing (bibuła) dramatically increased, and many publications were distributed throughout the entire country. After 1989 some of the underground publishers in Poland transformed into regular and legal publishing houses. In the 1980s, at any given time there were around one hundred independent publishers in Poland who formed an exceptionally vibrant segment of the black market. Books were sold through underground distribution channels to paying customers, including subscribers. Marek Kaminski is Associate Professor of Political Science and Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine. Between 1982 and 1989 he managed Solidarity’s underground publishing house STOP. In his landmark book Games Prisoner’s Play: The Tragicomic Worlds of Polish Prison, Kaminski presents unsparing accounts of initiation rituals, secret codes, caste structures, prison sex, self-injuries, and of the humor that makes this brutal world more bearable. This is a work of unusual power, originality, and eloquence, with implications for understanding human behavior far beyond the walls of one Polish prison. Here is an excerpt from the Introduction of that book. ———————————————————————— Prison socializes an inmate to behave hyperrationally. It teaches him patience in planning and pursuing his goals, punishes him severely for his mistakes, and rewards him generously for smart action. No wonder that inmates are such ardent optimizers. A clever move can shorten one’s sentence, save one from rape or a beating, keep one’s spirit high, or increase one’s access to resources. There is little space for innocent and spontaneous expressions of emotion when they collide with fundamental interests. Brutal fights, self-injury, and rapes can all be explained as outcomes of carefully calculated actions. Paradoxically, much of the confusion in interpreting prison behavior arises from both a failure to understand the motives of inmates and an unwillingness to admit that outcomes judged as inhuman or bizarre may be consequences of individually rational action. The main message of the book is that prisoners optimize under the constraints of their harsh life conditions and the local subculture. Their behavior reflects their attempts at optimization. Such a “rational choice” approach helps us to better understand prison behavior. A Personal Note I beg the reader’s forgiveness for a brief personal narrative that explains how I learned this lesson myself, and how I collected the data that support it. This is not an autobiography, but I would not be writing this book had I not experienced the life of a prisoner firsthand. In 1985 I was a twenty-two-year-old sophomore student of sociology who had switched disciplines, disappointed with abstract concepts after three diligent years of studying math. Poland had just witnessed the glorious rise of the Solidarity movement in 1980 followed by the introduction of martial law under General Jaruzelski in 1981 with the rationale that can be summarized as “I kicked your ass, but the Soviets would shoot it.” Dissatisfied with the moral and aesthetic poverty of communist way of life, I joined the underground Solidarity resistance network. In 1985, I was running an underground publishing house, STOP that employed about twenty full-time workers and up to 100 moonlighters. Between 1982 and 1989, we published about thirty-five titles of more than 100,000 books combined. We were a part of a decentralized network that included about 100 underground publishing houses, hundreds of periodicals, thousands of trade union organizations with a hierarchically organized leadership structure, a few Nobel prize winners, and even underground theaters, galleries, and video rentals. We called it an “independent society.” Half-revolutionist, half-scholar in the making, I was also looking for a topic for my Masters thesis in social anthropology. With hesitation, I started collecting data on the inner workings of the resistance network. My dilemma was figuring out how to balance facts with fiction. If too accurate, my thesis could easily become a handbook for the communist secret police. After my thesis defense I could also fall under permanent surveillance, effectively preventing me from running my organization. At the very worst, the communist court could use my thesis as evidence and throw me in prison. On March 12, 1985 my thesis dilemma was solved. During a random stop at a police checkpoint, “Dragon,” the driver of our van, was so nervous that the policeman became suspicious. He disregarded Dragon’s fake documents and implemented a thorough search of the van, which was filled with illegal Solidarity books. Dragon decided to talk. Within hours, five secret police agents had escorted me to a police station, joking that “you will have to swim, Mr. Marek.” In fact, I was “swimming”–police jargon for jail sentence–for five months in the Bialoleka and Rakowiecka jails. On my second day in a police station cell, after overcoming my initial shock and disbelief, I decided that my thesis would be on the subculture of Polish prison. After just several hours I knew that I was entering a bizarre, terrifying, and incredibly interesting environment. Rapes, knife fights, suicides, brutal sex, blunt talk, and self-injuries appeared to be its chief attributes. Ordinary life was reduced to eating and defecating. It seemed as if Pandora had freed all the imaginable violent human emotions from her box there and let them play without the usual societal constraints. I decided to make the best of my personal misfortune and use it as a unique opportunity to study this fascinating society-within-society. My goals were clear: I did not want to write nostalgic memoirs or point an accusing finger at the regime that had jailed me. I wanted to conduct an extensive and uncompromising research project, using all of my methodological skills. I expected that this would require developing new research techniques or modifying old ones. I was ready to face the necessary risks. It was up to me whether I mobilized my academic spirit–or gave
Nizamuddin
Devi Prasad Mishra [This is a selection from the poetry series Nizamuddin that first appeared in the Hindi language blog Tadbhav–तद्भव early this year. Translated by HUG] ——————————————— (1) Mean lane and a cow a woman almost touching go past each other and both have babies in their womb and both are tired and both have no hurry at all to reach home and a man makes his way through them about whom it is said that he is a police informer and keeps tabs on people around and a kite-laden boy whizzes right through all three of them and a woman in burkha is walking straight from the other side who reserves enough convenience to cry as she will or laugh out loud with available rotten vulgarity. Bahadur Shah Zafar’s arrest is still fresh news in the lane as fresh as the news of the arrest of a young man arrested for implanting bombs and explosives. In the far corner of that restaurant sits a man with his elbows on the table whose omelette is getting cold and stale waiting right there for hours. He may be in the know that a tunnel has been secretly constructed from Gujarat to Nizamuddin and people are freely using it. This tunnel has been there always—now here now gone. Quite a few rumours about Nizamuddin usually waft around. (2) As I made my way out of the lane A tree welcomed me and I counted 21 birds And as I looked more carefully 17 more Little ones I found hidden And then 21 more trees This road I could call wild, untamed, still unmanicured like the Hindi literary landscape And when I spot that girl who was from the third or fourth tradition, I realized she is lanky and blithe. She is Zeenat, that’s her name Who, after having gotten a BA degree from Meerut University Wanted to do her MA in English From the Indira Gandhi Open University I mean the same girl who had conspired to send packing the Brits from India in 1857. (3) Rahim could just be around the corner walking around Rahim’s tomb I felt so. But that accident is averted—that of one poet’s meeting another. Pigeons make that unerring sound with their wings—whirrrrrr—and keep that sound in your mind intact brother. I keep walking around the tomb. Is someone going to appear or am I loitering in the clatter of the departed? The wildness of my language in tombs lying around—shadowy, decrepit. And an incoming phone call—may be the apocalyptic call that will decimate Hindi poetry altogether and it has by now reached Sarai Kale Khan… (4) Now what can one do if goats loiter often at my poet’s grave it is now Nazeer now Ghalib. When Asad Zaidi chuckled in his usual boisterous way and told me this truth I didn’t reply that this could easily become a neat slice of some utterly poetic line. Have I ever tried to impress upon you that Nazeer Akbarbadi must be included in the Hindi poetic canon and a carbon copy of this plea always lie with me somewhere and after my death you will retrieve that and then whether you bury, burn or turn me to vultures I have no business. I mean if you bury me goats will inevitably arrive. If you decide to burn me I will disappear into the hydrants leading up to the Ganga. But how did this rumour get to your ears that vultures mean those commentators in Hindi who hover around the corpses of control and command. Suppose I get a breather from the vultures? (5) I have no clue whether this is apocryphal that once Mirza sahab had narrated a tale about a man who was turning out to be a power-hungry hireling and the loss was this that his yield and turnover was never getting diminished. (6) As I keep thinking what Mirza sahab may have verbalized and what he might have given a pass I wander into a particularly momentous bylane and chance upon this shoe. This was the lost shoe of one Zaidi. Yes sir, that same Zaidi who had pelted the other one of the pair at Bush. This one got saved and so I chanced upon it at Nizamuddin. Now you have put me in a quandary by reminding me that this one might be Zain-ul-Abideen’s who was Mohammad’s great-grandson and was called Zaid. But this shoe can be anybody’s as the tilism says and it could be Mirza sahab’s too as you know he would often appear donning a single piece of footwear. Or may be the shoe had been one Nizamuddin’s, who, Khuda grant him happiness, was no less of a maverick. It is also said that he had once assailed a hakim with a shoe or was it Allaudin Khilji with whom he got engaged in this kind of a scrap? But today I have found the shoe and I am going to return from Nizamuddin’s hearth with this one undamaged. And now I have this in my mind that all sensitive, wise people always have and will put on but one shoe. The other is always hurled at the powerful. (7) Look at the results of writing for all How my work swells and takes its toll How voluble, such loudness that it turns out So measly and they say I am on a roll! Sitting right in the middle of the marketplace I quote my price and my earnings praise All those matter don’t miss such bargain such ways The morning that you fancied now dazzles in twilight Daze now argue Marx or that shitty mall carry on the Lalgarh craze and my beloved country see how the Masjid sways and stillness gone now infamy stays In Nizamuddin, such is its daily overwhelming maze. (8) The mushaira session went on till the early hours. People seemed to return from some kind of