Great Literature Cannot Reach Half-Humans
HUG interviews Anil Kumar Yadav _____________________________ HUG: What do you do? Anil: Mostly I live in the subconscious, or in semi consciousness, shall we say. Something silently keeps on happening in my head. Not objective happening actually, but rather something is always ‘taking place’. And I am acutely aware of this drive. I am continually observing myself, as if in an out of body experience. I often have changed jobs or have not had stable jobs. So, I observe. May be there are three possible coordinates, each overlapping with the other. Not that these thoughts are all well formulated, but still— First there is an acute craving to find a new language. So that one can at least come somewhat closer to the real. But I keep on failing. My writing, its relevance, if any, seems to be only partial. I do have a language of my own; I nurture a particular way of expression, my style, that is—but that does not mean that I have discovered a new vocabulary. I am unable to make any profound connection with the passing moments of our time. I am also being quartered by a piercing, devastating sense of dread. Every waking moment. Even while half asleep. How shall I put it! See, there are these two parts in my mind. Two sides, yes. Each conspires and negates the other. Each will not allow the other to function at all. Not that these two sides are indignant with each other. They are not. They are like childhood playmates-बाल-सखा . There is this negative side; it wanders. This is my imaginative side. The positive side of my mind, on the other hand, keeps on thinking. It is driven by the worthy, necessary wishes of life. The third is about my non-faith in relations and friends. Particularly friends. Not that one needs friends in order to help solve things or to be by one’s side, during times difficult or joyous. That kind of sentimentality I have long let go. No, not that. But friends can actually sometimes invest in and refine one’s thought process. By brainstorming along with you about life’s various issues, they give you a sense of perspective, or so I used to think. But I have no faith in faith, none in relations—in love, friendship or relatives anymore. These not only work at a very superficial order of things, but the real point is that friends can never do anything about how you will actually deal with life or about your deepest concerns in life. I am far more connected now with my feelings and thoughts as I have learned to navigate life on my own terms. You do not rely upon faith anymore. You live life. Period. I gradually began feeling that all my so called affective relationships have no investment whatsoever with my concerns, with truth, with my fantasies, and with life’s realties at all. These are the things I do. HUG: What do you see? Anil: This word mainstream has lost all connotations because the margin keeps on shifting and morphing continuously. All these debates about the mainstream and the margin are simply putrified and ossified into meaninglessness. There are deep connivances. People that I see and work with are like gladiators, safeguarding and defending the interests of their emperors. I feel helpless and I can see this helplessness with utmost clarity. People like me are so beyond even the margins that even to remark or comment about politicians, corrupt godmen, criminals or the mafia raj seems to be meaningless. Such a small fry I am. The deep connect that the thinking, feeling class of people used to have with the local and the regional have just evaporated. Only the politicians are mostly connected with their constituencies, using that connection for their own ends. They will cry with you if your mother passes away, right? But the artists and the thinking class have left their public sense of critical and irreverent attitude in order to cater to mere publicity. Forget bohemianism; the artists are not even connected to their mohalla. The ubiquity of the tentacles of such a culture that the medium allows and proliferates makes me see helplessness with an even greater sense of clarity. All relationships are also part of the same change; they operate in flux. That is real. In fiction or in a travelogue, you refract the different modes of this forlorn, paralyzed reality. This helpless predicament becomes most vivid when I feel that my language is unable to reach people. I am a writer and I am unable to reach out with some serious concern or with some genuine humour to the people I write for? Just think of the level of vulnerability! One reason for that is my own limitation, I am sure. The other is that the levels of consciousness in my circle of readership are very very poor. I can only talk about the Hindi language readership. But I suspect the malaise goes deeper and is endemic. My purported readers are materialistic, wooly and thick. And the levels of feelings have gone numb. I am particularly thinking of the lower middle class, the poor and the half-humans. They do not see or hear. Their senses are numb. They have been made numb. They are destined to remain confused. See, for generations they have not had adequate food, shelter, education. And it is not just about economic exploitation. There is this rich exploitation in the name of religion or caste. Have you seen lower middle class folks carefully? Their gait and height and body weight? They are dwarfs. Great literature cannot reach half-humans. No sir. What finer aesthetic qualities are we talking about? Shall I then dumb down my own capabilities? That means I am sacrificing life and art in order to do some kind of penance, right, for being born in such situations in the subcontinent?So, I only observe these half-humans—sometimes with compassion, but often with disgust
Set Your Inner Deities and Demons Free
Shobhan Som interviews Ramkinkar Baij [Translation: HUG] Shobhan: Kinkarda—how does one learn painting and artistry? Ramkinkar: First, you must learn how to observe. Your eyes and mind must be open and agile. This exquisite and brimming world of rupa wishes to witness her maya’s pratirupa through you. That pratirupa is your painting or sketch. The basic ways of artistry are line, tone, colour and texture. You create form with the help of these tools. These are like the alphabets of art—a, b, c, d. When spectators look at an art object, they perceive rupa, mediated through these elements. The sense of line, tone, colour and texture are present right within nature. The way to learn painting is to relate your power of observation to these basic alphabetical tools. If you are able to see correctly, then you will also be able to show it so. Shobhan: The students of art school learn artistry by observing live models sitting at close quarters. You do not make such models sit in your class. But ask students to create from life itself. Ramkinkar: Placing an inert human being in front of you and life itself are not the same thing. You cannot find life in self-conscious and tentative possibilities. Life is dynamic. Life resides in naturalness. One has to see the ease with which life moves; your job is to catch a glimpse of that, feel how the life force throbs. As an artist dynamism should propel you. If you cannot, if you make mistakes, watch life again and once again. Try to analyze where the error is being committed. Draw again, create one more time. Painting cannot be a copy of anatomy. Copying inert life in toto makes no art object, no sculpture. Shobhan: In your classes on sculpting clay-model busts, instead of providing us with a common model, you have asked us to observe each other and sculpt the busts. Why this? Ramkinkar: In case of creating human busts, one has to feel and observe the subject from every angle, in the round, not in relief. You all, my students, have for years in the past not only seen each other’s physical features, but have known each other deeply too. In such art one not only needs to respect the rules of verisimilitude but must bring forth and reveal the inner traits of an individual. Not just frontally; you have to capture the person from every angle. In the atelier, as you place the clay on the whirling-couch and move about, you can see each other from every side. And as you look at each other, the inner deities and demons of the other will become sharper and clearer by the very touch of your fingers on the clay. You will know your subject deeply, begin to feel his presence. Such dynamic, intimate observation and detailing is impossible if an inert model is placed in front of you. Shobhan: There are issues of measurement and estimation. Can we use calipers? Ramkinkar: Minimize the use of calipers as much as possible. Get a sense of the countenance and profile of the subject. The physical tool will give you accuracy but art is not about accuracy. Use your eyes for calculating proportion. Do use machines only when there is any scope for doubt. Or else do not. Your eyes need to be trained into this sense of assessment. Another thing, if you observe carefully you shall see that the two eyes of a human are not exactly the same. The face is slightly asymmetrical. This is most evident if you look at the two sides of the nose, cheeks and ears. Whenever you indulge in the art of portraiture, give special attention to this aspect. (He looks at a scroll painting being mounted badly and yells with a start). What is that, how…? Shobhan: Why Kinkarda? Ramkinkar: Eh, you have dressed the princess with a gamchha! Mounting is an essential part of painting. Just like the dignity of the princess is diminished if clothed in a gamchha, so also one cannot present a picture in any which way. Even a good picture gets a raw deal if not mounted properly. The painting is incomplete until mounted. It is not about expensive mounting. Have you not seen those ornate, foreign frames? One is not sure whether to look at the painting or the frame! Good mountings reveal the painting, not curb its potential. Gaganbabu (Gaganendranath Tagore) revolutionized things by putting a premium on neat mountings once he watched the Japanese. The top of the painting and the two sides must have equal measurement and the bottom one and a half times to that—this is how cut-mounting works. Frame ought to be thin, with a certain economy, and stark. Mashtarmashai (Nandalal Bose) has conducted lot of experiments with mountings. Shobhan: What is abstract art? What is its objective? Ramkinkar: Some art puts a premium on description, others instead of mimesis, endeavor to capture the inner lyric of the subject matter. Just like in music. One cannot copy the rupa of music. One cannot copy a cuckoo and papiya in order to catch the musical sense of the season of spring. One must feel the season and set out to create the form of spring in music. That is how the ragas are shaped, or are set free actually. One is only then able to catch a glimpse of the aseem within our finitude. Abstract art is the harnessed music of our feelings about the great outdoors. There is a deeper symmetry in all successful abstract art. The rhythm of the lines shall sing aloud. Listen deeply to our classical music and feel the strains—you shall realize how abstraction plays out. And its objective will become clearer to you. Tradition and abstraction are not always at loggerheads. Shobhan: But when one of our students works on some abstract form, you smash and
There was a fine struggle for the beads! : Franz Boas, His Journals
Among the Innuit of Baffin Island 1883 In the summer of 1883 Franz Boas travelled from Germany to Cumberland Sound, Baffin Island, aboard the sailing vessel Germania whose main objective was to evacuate the personnel of the German station of the First International Polar Year from Kingua Fiord. Boas planned to spend a year as a participatory observer, living and travelling with and studying the Inuit of this part of Baffin Island. This detailed study summarizes and evaluates Boas’ preparations, his fieldwork, and the subsequent period of data analysis and evaluation. The fieldwork may be divided into two phases: Over the winter of 1883–1884 Boas confined himself to Cumberland Sound and during this phase he was considerably dependent on the American and Scottish whalers wintering at Kekerten. During the second phase, in the spring and summer of 1884, Boas crossed the Cumberland Peninsula and visited numerous Inuit communities along the Davis Strait coast; during this period he was much more dependent on his own resources. Below—a selection from his journal entries of late 1883. ___________________________ [Notebook] 2 Oct, 1883 [Tuesday] Calm in the morning; at 8.30 the Eskimos towed the ship out of the harbour; afterwards there was a good northerly breeze. Overcast; east shore clear. Soon afterwards we had a very strong north wind and high seas which probably make it impossible to pick up the oil; very cold. [FB/MK] (…) Listen Marie, if you want to be proud of me about it [his research] because the people in Hamburg praised me as I was leaving, you have no real cause to be. It was quite natural that they should flatter me ostentatiously on the last day. Don’t be afraid, I know what such talk signifies, so I remain your sensible Franz. And even after what I later read about myself in the newspaper, [which was more laudatory] than I would prefer, I shall still be writing sensibly; I know too that the Berliner Tageblatt will be tooting its own horn. The only yardstick of what one does is the acknowledgment that one has done one’s duty, whether the success is great or small. Believe me, no idle gossip will ever turn my head. I have my eye firmly on my goal and know what I have to do and what work is worthwhile. You know, I don’t even think much of the fine expressions about devotion to science. Anyone who goes out to investigate something has his own good personal reasons, whether it be the pure desire for knowledge, the desire for adventure, or whatever. And you know what it was in my case: the desire to establish an independent existence – even before I knew that my beloved loves me again – and scientific interest. I do not know what would have been more difficult for me, to go or to stay. (…) Since the weather is no better, and since there is no prospect of a change in the weather, the captain has decided to take us to Middleaktuk, and then to return home. If it is better on the morning of the 4th he wants to take the oil with him. In the morning I finished my letters; I could see only extensive, heavy ice masses to the north, lying immediately west of Middleaktuk I. An ice field about 15-20′ high; we are passing a piece that has broken off. Three last cheers and the final parting from Europe for this year. 21 Oct, 1883. This morning we had to repitch the tent entirely, because the wind had reduced it to total disarray. The roof lay on the ground and everything was full of ice and snow. For 3 days we unfortunates have had no dry gloves left, so this morning I hit on the bright idea of using stockings as gloves; this works quite magnificently. (…) Due to the shortage of firewood I have had to reduce our meals to one, at noon, when we have coffee and bread with frozen meat, or soup, bread and butter. In the morning and evening there is only bread and meat. We had been working all morning to be able to have lunch and now the hot soup pot has appeared in our tent, and with it all the Eskimos, each with his tin cup in hand. 23 October [Tuesday] I began to work out my observations. After long contemplation the barometer was mounted near the table. I gave Nachojaschi and Yankee bread, powder and tobacco; I also gave N.[achojaschi] another knife since he had lost his. In the afternoon they asked me to go and see a sick woman. She had pneumonia and was very sick, with a high fever. I wanted to put warm, wet poultices on her chest, but realized that it was impossible, because she was continually sitting with her chest and abdomen bare, catching the full draught from the door. So I could do nothing but give her some opium for her cough and quinine for her fever. 24 [October, Wednesday] I have had Wilhelm make a box for the thermometer. I am continuing to work up my data from Pagnirtu. My things are gradually getting finished; thus my stockings, curletang [I. qulittaq = outer coat] and pants are ready. Mutch’s kuni [Inuk woman] is complaining of a sore ear. The sick woman appears to be slightly better, but I prefer not to give her anything more, since I still cannot help her. 26[October, Friday] In the morning Mutch made a coffin for the dead woman, who has not yet been buried. Itu did not come to make coffee for Mutch this morning, because his son was very scared over the woman’s death. The occupants of the hut have abandoned her. One woman immediately tore her skin pants off and ran outside when she realized that she was dead. She had died unnoticed by anyone. [FB/parents, sisters] (…) When you get these letters from me, you will
The Matter of History: Himalayan Mountaineering, its Archives & some Inexcusable Gaps
Amrita Dhar _______________ The Flour and the Porters One summer morning a few years ago I was walking hurriedly across a stretch of Hyde Park in London. I was returning to the Royal Geographical Society for another greedy day with the lantern slides from Eric Shipton’s photographs—and I was running out of time. I would be leaving the country soon, and there was no way I would quite finish looking through the contents of even all of these boxes. I knew that the Royal Geographical Society’s cache of Shipton photographs and documents was by no means exhaustive, but they had slides from some of his most delicious wanderings. Last week, I had spent hours devouring the ones from Kashmir and Garhwal, and there were whole boxes promising others from Sinkiang and the Karakoram. The slides were dusty and out of order within their boxes, the cataloguing was a bit primitive (for instance, captions were inconsistent, and for photographs that Shipton appeared in, there was usually no way of knowing who the photographer had been), and the viewing apparatus was adequate but less than ideal (a flat back-lit board on which you could place the slides, and then you could magnify-by-glass or squint your way through them). But even so, the places and the people jumped out at me. I had stood right there, on the Ganges watershed, looking at Kamet in the distance as I held my breath in the cold air. And I had looked from just there on the Gangotri Glacier, craning my neck a bit to see Shivling. And wow, is that the view from Aghil Pass? No wonder everyone waxes eloquent about it! And what an unreal landscape of ice pinnacles on the Kyagar Glacier. And I had seen this photograph of Pasang, Kusang, and Ang Tharkay somewhere in print. But look at this one with Shipton and Ang Tharkay together—what smiles. And so on. On the way back that evening, it struck me, although without surprise, that I had indeed failed to look through all the photographs I wanted to. I should never have been able to in the limited time I had at my disposal anyway, and to compound it all, I had been distracted by a box of documents. The box was a curious collection of things—from a letter written by a very young schoolboy Eric to his mother from Beaumont House, to a VHS with a recording of Shipton on This Day Tonight by Australian Broadcasting Corporation Television on 31 October 1972, and donated to the Royal Geographical Society by Jane Allen in 2012. I had stopped at a few typescripts and drafts, and at a few letters. Short essays—‘Hunger’, ‘The Cave’, ‘The Long Walk’ typed up and annotated/edited by hand—and a longhand manuscript of That Untravelled World. And letters written to Shipton in 1952 following the curious chapter of his being selected for leadership of the British Everest expedition of 1953, and then having to stand down. Thus John Hunt: ‘I want you [Shipton] to know that I am conscious of filling your place most inadequately’ (in a letter dated 13 September 1952).Or one R.Varvill telling the now unemployed ‘Dear Shipton’ not to wait very hopefully for a job from the Colonial Office: ‘The Tonga job which, incidentally is called “Consul and Agent, Tonga”, will not become vacant until well into 1954; and there is no saying, whether the present incumbent might have his term extended’ (in a letter dated 25 November 1952). Or planning papers for Everest 1953—papers that lay out intentions of a clear departure from the Shipton style of carefree mountain travel—copied to Shipton by the infinitely more dogged John Hunt. ‘The ultimate aim of the expedition, as defined by the Sponsoring Authority, is the ascent of Everest during 1953 by a member or members of the party. This aim may appear self-evident, but it is of vital importance that it should be borne constantly in mind, both during the preparatory phase and, later, in the field. All planning and preparation must lead us methodically towards the equivalent of that aim’ (‘Memorandum on Everest 1953’). And so on. Despite having read Shipton’s own writings, I had not been prepared to so be confronted by these sharp flashes of an intense, lonely, joyous, and restless life. Although I should have learnt my lesson by now, for had I not had exactly this experience while sitting down last week in Magdalene College, Cambridge, with the letters, notebooks, and postcards of Dorothy Pilley, an extraordinary British climber who was active in the early twentieth century in the mountains of England, Scotland, and Wales? Scholars of autobiography have long pointed out how much gets left behind or deliberately excluded or forgotten from a life in the creation of a life’s narrative. This evening I was realizing anew the truth of these observations. Just as Pilley’s Climbing Days (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1935) by no means encompassed everything her climbing days were about, Shipton’s several volumes of travelogue and autobiography too left gaps both in biography and in social history that only sound archival research can fill. I therefore found myself thinking with greater urgency of the need for scholarship, history, and good biography.[1] As a scholar who had long found top-down or peak-centric or genius-ridden or exception-oriented mountaineering narratives to be problematic, inadequate, and even dishonest, I was also, perhaps predictably, thinking of the less visible mountain lives surrounding Shipton’s. By this, I don’t mean Bill Tilman. Tilman’s superlative travels and magnificent books (now collected in the anthology of The Seven Mountain-Travel Books) have their own galaxy of pleasures, intrigues, and problems. I also don’t mean Diana Shipton. Although The Antique Land (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1950) is a delightful read and a heartily recommended volume for any library focused on mountain travel. I was also not thinking just of Ang Tharkay, Pasang, and Kusang, the three Sherpa mountaineers whose athletic expertise and overall versatility had an immense