Jo Hona Tha Hona Tha, Jo Nahin Hona Tha Hona Tha: Poetry in Turbulent Times, HUG with 5 Poets in Varanasi
Poetry in Turbulent Times. HUG in Varanasi, with Ashtabhuja Shukla, Pankaj Chaturvedi, Vyomesh Shukla, Avinash Mishra and Siddhant Mohan. ___________________ On the sidelines of the Hindi Yuva Kavi Sangam, 2016, held at Benaras (February 26-27, 2016), HUG met with five contemporary Hindi poets who nurture a strong sense of the aesthetic, political and philosophical struggles that rage in the deepest recesses of our land. The idea of the nation is naturally fractious in the arts, in poesie more so. In fact, civilization or nation make little sense in defining and then transforming our realities into art forms. For poetry addresses our times, sometimes by unleashing myths and metaphors, and at other times, through subtraction–starkly, wielding the precise markers of language in keen realization of what the moment might demand. And yet, communicating poetry also needs some kind of binding force, a register that is material and personal, even as we objectively see history unfolding through varied inflections in different parts of our land. What do we expect from the conjurers of language in such troubled times as we live now? Should poetry say things simply and directly to power? Or should it instead seek refuge in the structures of the timeless and the transcendental? Is it possible to marshal a language that dares to take the challenge head on? What can be learnt and discarded from the older forms of poetry? How much is worth renewing? In the video links below, these five poets candidly talk about their convictions and art practice by historically situating the contemporary. The whole discussion has been divided into three sections. Connect your system to the speakers and click on the individual links please : 1. HUG at Yuva Kavi Sangam, 2016, Varanasi, Part I 2. HUG at Yuva Kavi Sangam, 2016, Varanasi, Part II 3.HUG at Yuva Kavi Sangam, 2016, Varanasi, Part III *** adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Dead Writing: Barthes and Posterity
Supriya Chaudhuri ___________________________ Posteritati (To posterity) In 1971, Roland Barthes gave an interview, originally intended for a series of televised broadcasts recorded under the title ‘Archives of the 20th Century’, in which he was asked to reflect on his life and work in response to a detailed questionnaire prepared by Jean Thibaudeau. This was four years before he published his idiosyncratic ‘auto-biography’, Roland Barthes (1975), translated into English as Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977). The interview was never televised so far as I am aware, not even, as Barthes speculated it might be, after ‘the death of the author’. This playful reference to a physical event, the cessation of a human life, through a phrase that the author had himself made famous as metaphor, comes at the very beginning of the published text of the interview in Tel Quel, Issue 47, a special issue devoted to Roland Barthes. The responses – which were in any case a ‘game’ to Barthes and Thibaudeau — had been rewritten for publication. Nevertheless, Barthes insists that ‘the effect of enunciation’, rather than the protocols of writing, is at work through the text, producing ‘an entirely imaginary and continuous first person’ (Barthes 1998: ‘Responses’, 249), rather like the subject of a novel who shared his birth date, 12 November 1915, with Barthes himself. Reflecting on the form of the interview, Barthes says: ‘What writing never writes is ‘I’; what speech always says is ‘I’; what the interviewer should solicit is thus the author’s imaginary, the list of his phantasms, in as much as he can reflect on them, speak of them in that fragile state’ (266). In Roland Barthes, he begins with the proviso, ‘It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.’ (Barthes 1994: 1) It is this Barthesian imaginary, this phantasm, then, who towards the close of the interview tells his interviewer: As for posterity, what can I say? It’s a dead word for me, which is giving it its dues since its validity is only established on the basis of my death. I consider I have lived well up to now … buried in the archives (of the twentieth century) perhaps one day I will re-emerge, like a fugitive, one witness among others in a broadcast of the Service for Research on ‘structuralism’, ‘semiology’, or ‘literary criticism’. Can you imagine me living, working, desiring, for that? If one day the relations between the subject and the world were to be changed, certain words would be dropped, like in a Melanesian tribe in which at death a few elements of the lexicon are suppressed as a sign of mourning; but it would be rather as a sign of joy; … this would happen doubtless to the word ‘posterity’, and perhaps to all the ‘possessives’ of our language, and, why not, to the word ‘death’ itself. (266-67) But posterity is not a possessive, as Barthes knew well: it is a substantive based on the Latin posteritas (‘descendants’), from posterus (‘coming after’, from post ‘after’). That Barthes links it to all the ‘possessives’ of our language indicates that he has in mind the genealogical notion of descent, that he wishes to disclaim the unborn generations claiming filiality with the dead author, and to say that they are dead to him. That is, we, who celebrate Barthes today, who call upon him to bear witness to structuralism, semiology, literary criticism, we are dead to him: and ‘if the relations between the subject and the world were to be changed’, both posterity and death would disappear from the lexicon. Rarely has an author spoken with more authority from his grave to disallow a memorial celebration. Still, if Barthes disclaims posterity, he does not in fact disclaim death, which may be why Jacques Derrida, in the first chapter of The Work of Mourning, uses the possessive case to speak of ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’. In effect, this is to remind us not only of the dead author – dead in physical fact at the time of writing – but also of the deaths by which he was moved and of which he wrote, the inscription of death in his writing, contrasted with the ‘literal’ impossibility of his actually saying ‘I am dead’ (Derrida 2001: 52, 64-65). Yet, as Barthes says elsewhere, ‘the voice is always already dead, and it is by a kind of desperate denial that, we call it living; this irremediable loss we give the name of inflection: inflection is the voice insofar as it is always past, silenced’ (Barthes 1994: 68). Writing insistently, obsessively, of death, throughout his life as a writer, Barthes may seem to avert his face from ‘his posterity’ (I use the possessive deliberately), but he is always addressing the ghosts, the spectral presences, released by the knowledge of death, his own and those of others. In his ‘auto-biography’, Roland Barthes, published five years before he died, Barthes positions himself, as Petrarch had done six centuries earlier in his ‘Letter to Posterity’, (‘Posteritati’, Seniles 18.1) within the binary of portrait and biography: offering us a choice of two representational modes, synoptic and chronological. The first is a selection of photographs mainly from his childhood and youth, haunted by that deathliness that Barthes associates with the form of the photograph itself; the second is a set of notes about a historical person, incomplete because he is still living, but anticipating death as the punctum that will make them meaningful. Yet, curiously, Barthes associates narrative with the first form of representation: the photographs tell a story, though one that is entirely ‘imaginary’, they are a succession of images, of a body now irrevocably lost, no longer that of the writer, ‘figurations of the body’s prehistory – of that body making its way towards the labor and the pleasure of writing’ (Barthes 1994: 3). That remembered, imagined narrative of youth is interrupted by the subject’s fall into text: Once I produce, once I write, it is
BHU: Pragmatism, Placation and Panic
Siddhant Mohan _____________________ Those who are oblivious or unperturbed about the sedition and felony charges brought against some students of Jawaharlal Nehru University are living in a better world. Important as it is, the media (and the powerful JNU alumni)—traditional, electronic and word of mouth—have made this news assume a larger than life dimension. Heroization of academic vanguardism has many worthy antecedents. While the incidents themselves are still unfolding and contingent, the reactions, abstractions and tales of glory brings a dimension of inevitability—an ironic form of heriozation perhaps? It is not surprising then that the national (and firmly nationalist now) and social media have been completely absent from another dramatic scene that was unfolding in Varanasi simultaneously: around hundred ABVP hooligans disrupted and vandalized a lecture event delivered by the academician, social scientist and Hindi poet Dr. Badri Narayan in Varanasi. Incidentally, he teaches in JNU. It happened on Valentine’s Day. Dr. Narayan was in Banaras Hindu University’s Art’s Faculty auditorium. He was delivering a special lecture organized in the memory of Late Kamla Prasad. The rubric: ‘Subaltern Societies and Indian Development.’ The Department of Hindi, BHU, was the chief organizer of the event. On the completion of his talk, Dr. Narayan answered few of the questions raised on the topic and took his seat. At some point Dr. Kashinath Singh, one of the foremost writers of our nation and an esteemed denizen of Varanasi, was delivering his presidential note. At that point the hooligans broke in. They were armed with the tricolour, saffron headbands, garish placards and with images of the soldiers who had recently died in Siachen. There entry and exit were book-ended with two matter-of-fact slogans, bereft of any ideology: ‘Stop the Program’ and ‘Maaro Joota Saale ko’ (Footwaer for the bastard!). Doubtless these rather universal and timeless slogans were directed at Dr. Narayan. While they were at the verge of assailing the stage, vandalize and eventually turn physical with the participants and spectators present there, a few Hindi poets confronted, argued and came together to neutralize the situation. The damage was done though—symbolically and emotionally. It is part of a larger pattern that is unfolding in institutes like BHU. To ponder on that, I take up the quill today. When ABVP activists ask how BHU dares to invite a professor from JNU who harbours a certain ethos, a political and literary sensibility which is not to their liking, it is in continuation of their condemnation of some other recent events in other parts of the nation, supported by the left and votaries of non-pragmatic identity politics. This is according to the script. What is not is the response: a professor from Hindi department, enlightened the ‘protesting’ students that if any anti-national is or was invoked in some other institute, BHU condemns it. The activists should seek an explanation from the administration as to how BHU dared to invite a professor from such a divisive and schismatic university. This placatory tone is characteristic of how we usually handle a contingent situation at hand: divert attention and make a temporary truce. But what price such quasi reconciliatory and paternalistic truce? One feels it emboldens a pattern in our institutions which has taken us away more and more from deliberative (or directly antagonistic) ways in public life. Even in a communitarian set up that marks a place like Varanasi, it means giving away a precious locational and affective space to an antagonist who is a master player in populist politics. Anyway, the din and brouhaha carried on for about 15 to 20 minutes. The poetry reading began soon after. Apart from Narayan himself, poets included Vyomesh Shukla, Ashish Tripathi, Anand Pradhan Sharma, Chandrakala Tripathi, Neeraj Khare and Baliraj Pandey. All of them condemned the attack and recited poems, many of which reverberated against fascism, colonialism and religious dictatorship. Only a handful of media houses reported this incident. Seemingly BHU itself has papered over this whole fracas. Life goes on. Or so it seems. The obvious factual question that can be raised against me is about my assertion that the hooligans were indeed ABVP members. But the fact of the matter is that the disruptors are quite brazen and upfront about it. Such is the level of their confidence in state backed majoritarianism of the kind hitherto unseen. They could target Dr. Narayan so easily because they have seen him on TV debates and there were his posters on the campus. Sources informed that someone had briefed the mobsters about the presence of JNU professor. They would not let go of such golden opportunity to score a point. Goons/Hooligans: I use such words with some hesitation. But advisedly too. Being judgmental too quickly is not a wise thing to do but not possessing a basic understanding of populist radical values operating in the chowks, mohallahs and premises of our nation is worse. For one, this form of populist universality is far from vague. Populism in our towns are a series of performative acts endowed with a rationality of its own, unto itself. Partly it is globalized aspiration. Partly a constant reconfiguration and unicity around a fictive idea of a mystical nation. Each new and heterogeneous incident and participation symbolically enhances populist reason. Its very mercenary nature allows, what Ernesto Laclau had called, a deeper homogeneity constructed by radical multiplicity of the popular—present as that which is absent. I am therefore using hooligan as a descriptive rather than as a purely pejorative term. The preferable word would be ‘activist’ except that there is no activism that is going on in our campuses and the adjoining areas now. Forms of pure retribution are void of any activist content. Activism does have a different meaning today though. Activism, nowadays, has come to mean treachery—of the nation and pater patria, pure and simple. Such is the level of heightened frenzy in the right voluntarist rhetoric at this point of time. It will be an important task for the social scientist to recalibrate and
On The Cold Dark Black Girnar: A Hanumana & Another
Amrit Gangar __________________ The sun has yet to tilt up perhaps a mile more to peep out of the ancient cleavages of the mount Girnār, much older than the Himālayas! No snow, only dark black rough rock that had once inhabited cultures and civilizations ranging from Shivaite to Buddhist to Jain to the primitive. Here on one of its peaks, as the legend goes, one Pāvāhari Baba was first initiated into the mysteries of practical yoga. Dattatraya had his abode here. In ancient times, the Girnār was called Raivata or Ujjayanta, and has been the temple-abode of the Jain Tirthankaras – Bāhubali, Neminātha, Pārsvanātha. In its womb, the mount Girnār nourishes mines of mysteries and caves of curiosities that never go to sleep at night with their eyes open, punctuated by the full moon or no moon and the strange sounds of cicadas. The sun is steady here in his movement, serene and soothing, intoxicated by his own fire, without soma. Lions stalk here, the ash smeared naked fakirs walk here fearlessly. Fear roams here fearfully in the narrow untouched virgin niches of the Girnār! A little away, hordes of bats hang on walls of the Adi Kadi Vaav, the fiftheenth century deep, dark ,unusual step-well, and the Navghan Kuvo, the well shy of a few years of being a thousand years old. A Gujarati proverb still lives and circulates around unsurreptitiously, “Adi Kadi Vaav ne Navghan Kuvo, Je Nā Juve te Jivto Muvo,” meaning, “Whoever has not seen the Adi Kadi step well (vaav) and Navghan well (kuvo), meets with death before dying.” But on the hills, death turns into life with Bhairav on the black rocks of Girirāj. Bhairav manifests here, and there. Shiva’s blue neck has gone bluer and no river flows from his thick black matted hair. Here on the Girnār plains flows a river named “Sonrekh”! “Oh! Se āmarā Subarnarekhā!” who said this? Where are you Sita? Abhiram? Where is your deserted airstrip? Your childhood playground? Ask all your gods, Girnār, to sing in chorus, “Aaj ki ananda… jhulat jhulane Shyamchanda…” From a Buddhist cave emerges a Shiva, in a Bahurupee! Buddha is tired of smiling here. Mahāvira, the Digambara, has dissolved into the wide open ambar, the sky that caresses the Girnar so giddily! Madness stalks here in the marrow of Time… And here on the Girnār, Hanumāna wears on different manifestations as the dark Bhairavs keep leaving behind their tantric footprints, you thought were yours! And one of the eleven faces of Hanumāna stares at you winking the monkey wink; still the sun has to tilt up many meters more to embrace the misty dawn of the hills overlooking the town of Junāgadh. Three poems for one wink… *** VĀNARA 1: LAMBE HANUMĀNA “O! Lords – Sun! Wind! Indra! Brahma! O! Bhutas! Let me turn taller than the mountain longer than the ocean,” prayed Hanumāna for Rāma his tail lengthening enlengthening on the steps of the Mount Girnār somewhere someone is chanting Sundarkānda, the red shot eyes you thought were owl’s were the ash smeared naked fakir’s the nāgābāwā, the Girnar’s child! “O! Sāgara! O! Vāyu!” prayed the vānara plunging into the Rāmāyana ocean paving the path, the vānara after vānara after vānara – brilliance of the dawn awaiting as Lambe Hanumāna caresses my face with a long soft tail you thought was his it was lion’s! Gir’s real governor! *** VĀNARA 2: ROKADIYĀ HANUMĀNA Pliable gods and pavitra every fifty steps a new Hanumāna new avatāra new energy new darkness of the Bhairava! Rokadiyā Hanumāna is unlike the Lambe yet like all his creed with sindoor and oil that eats devotees’ coins stuck on the body, the rokdā you said mythifying the money you never earned! Rishi Girirāj inhabits many a divine vānara with heads small, eyes big wide opened or not belly flat or ballooned, Hanumāna fascinates the mountain with a memory Sahajānand and his discovery of Rokadiyā Dev Hanumāna an embodiment of truth satisfying all desires truthful – Paint any stone vermillion and a Hanumāna is born in search of a truth waiting for the Ushā, her light! *** VĀNARA 3: HANUMĀNA WITH ELEVEN FACES Ekādash-mukhi Hanumāna, words tell you before you count the heads hands and eyes doubling! from a corner as the bell chimes and lamp flickers devouring the dawn appears Lopāmudra, saying – “O! sage born out of the pot, O! ocean of mercy Hanumāna’s yantras and mantras are not new to me you have revealed them to me! Tell me about the armor of the eleven-faced Hanumāna!” Girnar baffles you with vermillion stones all Hanumāna covered with mythologies unmummified Don’t search for meanings here ever smear your body with ash of memories mysteries you search for are malapropisms! *** Junāgadh, 8 February 2016 ______________ Amrit Gangar is a Mumbai-based writer, curator, film theorist and historian. He writes both in English and Gujarati languages. adminhumanitiesunderground.org