Humanities Underground

Marginal Habitation, Spectacular Presences: Ramkinkar and the Elasticity of Margins

Pradip Kumar Datta In common usage the idea of the margins indicates a position that is outside the mainstream yet related to it. This provides a rich vantage point to critique the structures of the mainstream.  Very often the epistemic position is elided with the social constituency/position with which this is associated. Often neglected in the advantages of this critical positioning is that it is a mobile one. What is marginal may move sometimes to the mainstream and even if it does not, may then migrate somewhere to a position that is an ambivalent one. This is often true of movements of art or of individual artists with their works – and even of intellectual and ideological movements. Ramkinkar’s life and work appears to me paradigmatic of the mobility of the margins. This is not simply in terms of the fabled recognition (and market price) of the signature of a once neglected artist achieving success and fame. Elements of Ramkinkar’s career – specifically his life and environmental sculpture – suggest a trajectory that is more subtle. Very little is known of Ramkinkar’s early years, but even the little information yields a life that was not tied to a fixed social position. Born in the little known Jugipara in Bankura district (now an urban area), he was from the barber caste. However, from his youth, he was attracted by the clay modelling of the kumars or potter caste and attached himself to one of its leading practitioners, learning by seeing them at work. It was here that his talent was first recognised by Anil Baran Ray, a touring Congressman who set him to work on nationalist banners and posters. The nationalist connection exposed him to Ramananda Chatterjee, editor of the Modern Review – an early nationalist journal that publicised a great deal of contemporary Indian art – and whose roots also lay in Bankura. A close friend of Rabindranath with institutional connections to Visva-Bharati, Ramananda arranged for Ramkinkar to formally study art in Santiniketan. The turn to nationalist mobilisation which enabled new linkages between the elite and their social others, provided the conditions for leaping across social milieu. Ramkinkars’ social mobility ensured for him a position of autonomy – but it also marginalised him in relationship to the collectives around him.  Equally significant and far more decisive was the nature of the new milieu that he entered. While drawing primarily on the middle class, Visva-Bharati was founded on a dissenting vision of the world. It produced a new mode of marginality. While Visva-Bharati has become a venerable – indeed a defining – institution of modern Bengal if not of independent India, it did not occupy the same position when Ramkinkar entered it as a resident student in 1925. It can be argued that Visva-Bharati emerged from Rabindranath’s dissenting position on the imaginary of the Nation-State which he called Nationalism, a critique that was crystallised by the Great War of European nations. Visva-Bharati’s location indexed its commitment. Situated about a hundred miles from Calcutta, then the second city of the Empire, it was connected to it – but from a distance. On the other hand, it also sought to service its surrounding villages for self-empowerment through collective functioning and technological infusions.  What we have here is an attempt to produce new kind of habitation drawing on an inter-embedding of the rural and the urban while creating networks – through Calcutta, with global connections. In other words, it sought to produce a marginal world with its own ecology that would provide an exemplary model for both the developmental needs of the colonised country as well as an outpost of peace and inter-connectedness for a post war world. To put it differently, its marginal position aspired to re-produce the mainstream. Within Visva-Bharati, Kala Bhavana, the arts school of Santiniketan where Ramkinkar studied and then stayed on as a teacher of sculpture, occupied a significant position. Its art practices moved away from the preoccupation with mythology, history and portraiture that had characterised modern Indian art till then. Instead of working within studios, Kala Bhavana pioneered a move to outdoor painting, representing rural workers and landscapes. In doing this, Kala Bhavana consolidated and enriched the linkage between the middle class world of Santiniketan and the rural world that surrounded it. Ramkinkar occupied an interesting position within this practice. If he had lead a “normal” career his low caste status may well have qualified him to have been an object of this art practice; instead he became the artist who had the privilege to represent what could have been his people. The in-between position of Ramkinkar needs a little more elaboration. I should mention here that Ramkinkar occupied an anomalous position in the actual middle class life of Santiniketan. It is true that he recalled the early days of Santiniketan with great affection, bemoaning its family-like intimacy. It is also true that he was given a great deal of support by Nandalal Bose who headed Kala Bhavana and recognised his talent; and it was Rabindranath who it is reported, upon seeing Ramkinkar working, promised to support him in sculpting massive figures and compositions despite the continuously cash-strapped condition of the university. At the same time, Ramkinkar left behind traces that indicated he was not quite comfortable in his environment. The social boundaries of Santinketan were never quite overtly asserted, but what Ramkinkar’s presence did was to crystallise these. In his memoirs he recollects having been asked about his name; his initial, awkward appearance clad in khadi also roused humour in his classmates. These were powerful intimations of the caste marginalisation that lay in store for him – and which is reflected in the fact that he changed his surname and once even hid his name. More consequential is the fact that he consolidated his marginal position himself. He quite openly drank liquor and had a live-in relationship with Radharani, a low caste widow who was initially his domestic worker and then became his model and muse

The Return of the Stone Age

[R. Chetankranti, Aatmadroh: New Delhi, Rajkamal Publications, 2023] Nothing catches the pungent flavour of masochist masculinity — and the helpless, misplaced obverse of such a state—which flags our schizoid times, as does the poetry of Ramkumar Chetankranti. His third volume of poetry आत्मद्रोह (Self-Mutilation) arrived yesterday by post.  And everything else has receded to the background since. The power of what is pent up right now is given a ruthless channel in his phrases and metaphors: a torrential flow of politico-psychosexual-garish-melancholic-self-defeating desire. A world of relentless self-flagellation, which drowns itself in a cocktail of vengeance and carnival mania—hoping to arrive at an ever-elusive somewhere. This is a greatly risky zone to traverse, for the language and world that the poet shows us will not be easily digested  by the kind of people who wish to stay ostrich like, scared of entering the zone of vengeful, amoral outbursts of the immediate quenching of desire which occupies our times. The first lines of the title poem have already turned into a prophetic epigram of sorts:और फिर देश यातना के लिए हाथ जोड़कर खड़ा हो गया सब एक आवाज़ में बोले, हमें दुःख दो और ज्यादा दुःख और ज्यादा यातना और ज्यादा पीड़ा वे सुख से ऊब चुके थे… (And then the country , beseeching  pain, with folded hands, stood up/ And uttered in one unified voice/ Give us torment/ Afflict us with agony/More stinging agony/Even more pain/ They were bored of happiness…) Slavoj Zizek, his curiosity piqued about the industrial production of testicle-crushers in Nazi Germany which were used against Jews and gypsies, tries a Google search, and is bemused to find that there are all kinds of ball-crushers available in the market—stainless steeled, diamond-studded, spare, ornate or custom made. Pleasure in renunciation is a deadly mission. Genuine puritans are able to master it to the hilt and spread it among the people. Chetankranti has been showing us the mirror right from the piercing utterances in शोकनाच /Shoknaach.  A generation (or does it really change every decade as claimed sometimes?) is coming into being after the 1990s and its contours are becoming more pronounced as the new century moves forward—“we were not revolutionaries/we were merely restless beings”: हम क्रांतिकारी नहीं थेहम सिर्फ अस्थिर थेऔर इस अस्थिरता में कई बारकुछ नाजुक मौक़ों परजो हमें कहीं से कहीं पहुंचा सकते थेअराजक हो जाते थेलोग जो क्रांति के बारे में किताबें पढ़ते रहते थेहमें क्रांतिकारी मान लेते थेजबकि हम क्रांतिकारी नहीं थेहम सिर्फ अस्थिर थे This applies to all hues of ‘revolutionaries’ of our times (barring very, very few resolute exceptions). His readers know that this very realization has led to Chetan’s Seelampur—a representative metaphor for the masochist location of pent up and self destructive desire. The educated are totally alienated from those who are being used, are dangerous, are preyed upon, are trapped, are naïve too—in Seelampur. Those who read books look at the denizens of this other world, and instead of walking halfway and offering a helping hand, turn themselves into numb ostriches: पढ़े-लिखे लोगों के लिए/वे पहेली थे/वे बैठे उन्हें बस देखते रहते/उनकी समझ में न आता/ की वे कब कहाँ और कैसे बने/क्यों हैं कौन हैं क्या हैं! To describe this class of the petty bourgeoisie, happy in its world of self-gratification, Chetan deploys a lovely phrase: छोटे छोटे बड़े लोग  (Little big people). But as hinted earlier, this zone is an amorphous one to get into. For there cannot be any clear answer as to how much  the poet listens to the sound and tenor of such self-mutilated bands and how much he castigates such mass ardour. Is his poetry a realist assessment of deep psychic turbulence? Or is it laid out to provoke and shake us from our slumber? Are his utterances being read by the people he addresses, beyond the polarized universe? This much is certain though: he is less forgiving of those who are managing the show, the magicians who stay in the background rather than the puppets who walk into their hands. For the former are the demagogues who enjoy most the conversion of people’s happiness into the black rain of blood and semen over very changing seasons.  For the God stands aloof, with a purpose: एक हाथ में शिशन और एक हाथ में चाकू लिए खड़ा हो | (Penis in one hand, knife in another). To use James Joyce’s pregnant phrase, used in a different context: “invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Such all engulfing desire for holding on to power has only one dread, a singular worry— पावर में इक कमी थी, तन्हाई से डरती थी  (‘वीरता पर विचलित’  से उद्धृत  ) | Power fears aloofness.  This is the lyrical zone of detachment which Chetan has kept aside for the kindred. The outside. Only this much.  Is aloofness poetry then? Beyond dreams and greed: वह तुम्हारे झुलसे बालों में/ बारिश करेगा/ वह तुम्हें रोने की जगह देगा| Not unlike in his previous anthologies, here too, Chetan takes us to the nadir of expectations, but his poetry never despairs about the future, for one day—all news cycle, busy printing presses, television anchors, rapt spectators –everything must fall silent: for everyone shall understand what is going on, with a collective sense of helplessness. On that day: हैरानी हैरान /और शैतानी निस्तब्ध|  (Bewilderment shall be bewildered/ And devilry cold). One can stop at this point. But it needs mentioning that there is another track of poems blossoming in all three anthologies which acts as a balm to readers who dare to pass the volcanic lava and soot of his generational outcry. This set of poems shows the other side of Chetankranti—softest of souls that he is: and that line wrestles with fathomless love and pain. On pain, for instance he says: वह भीतर कहीं बो दिया होगा /बहुत पहले कभी /और सींचा नहीं गया होगा /इसलिए पानी-पानी पुकारता रहता है | (Not irrigated, the embedded seed of pain cries: Water, Water!) But that story must be saved for some other day. *** adminhumanitiesunderground.org

The Equitable Force of Destitution

HUG reviews: Nund Rishi: Poetry and Politics in Medieval Kashmir by Abir Bazaz. Cambridge University Press, 2023 What happens to the one who has drunk the nectar and found taste in wild vegetables? The same one is seized by the leopard that is death in life itself. And in solitude such a being can hear the rumblings of a day when the sky shall melt like molten copper and mountains look like fluffs of wool. Abir Bazaz has crafted a tapestry of patient, utopian and life affirming possibilities by explicating the inner workings of affirmative negation that is non-dual gnosis; in this particular case, that of sahaja Islam, as felt and realized in the many utterances (especially through the shruk—a quatrain that expresses a single thought) of Nund Rishi (1378-1440)—Kashmir’s most revered saint-poet and founder of the Rishi Order. Once he has given us a sense of what might be the contours of the sahaja vath (path) in Kashmir and what its similarities and differences are with other such traditions on the subcontinent and in wider South Asia, Bazaz delves deep into three intimate ideas and their relationship with each other in shaping such a sahaja world: the trope of ‘death before dying,’ the unity of negation-affirmation, and the apocalypse of the ‘afterworld’ which is also immediate and political. Love is taking a Beehive into your Coat What is syncretic in gnosis is also esoteric. The fragrant secret of the subtle knot is not to be divulged always in ecstasy. One of the finely-drawn threads in this work depicts how Nund Rishi was carefully trying to finding a way through the Shari’ah (from shara-road) and more ecstatic Sufi utterances (shath). It is not easy to place him. Indeed, for Nund Rishi, Shari’ah is the sahaja path. It is a bank to the river of human action. What is important is creating the common conditions of self transformation. The transformation is at once within selves, and also a possibility open to common humanity if it can realize the workings of such gnosis. All charlatanry in teaching and accepting knowledge must be abandoned if one has to enter such a zone of transformation. One cannot pretend to be an elder in the exchange of knowledge—Bazaz introduces a sense of radical equity right there. Decoding the hermeneutics of the shruks is not only about the pyrotechnics of kalam. The authentic faqih (jurist) and alim(scholar) must invoke the idea of amal (action) and other practices of the self. The book is about achieving a difficult sobriety. Bazaz tells us about the ecstatic utterances and martyrdom of the Sufi saint poet— Mansur al-Hallaj. He was maimed, quartered and stoned to death. Hallaj’s divine realization is beyond doubt but his error was in divulging the inner truths of gnosis, and the fragrance of unity was thus dissipated. He could not “bear the blow of the divine flash” and got “his windpipe shattered.” Nund Rishi, by contrast to such an ecstatic Sufism, seeks a more “simple, navigable path.” The ‘way of going” is rather a patient and difficult talk, he suggests—a commitment to a universalism that has to be earned from the pain that is love and total abandonment. Only the one who is cast out turns into a sahajia. At this point Bazaz tries to tackle one of the unresolvable but productive dilemmas of such gnosis: after such knowledge, does the vath lead to a supraconscious state of void (sunyata) or to a total immersion in life’s flow and trans-religious variegatedness? At times Bazaz (with cues from the likes of Rahman Rahi) seems to suggest that the latter was the path of Lal Ded (and is she therefore more poetic?) rather than Nund Rishi. The former is sweet and ecstatic, the other, serious and heavy.  But more often than not in the book, the two of them are placed as carrying forward the same tradition. Shops after Closing Time Death is a stealthy thief: “that which leaves nothing intact.” The shruks are aporetic knots. These are ‘touchstones’ that are often paradoxical and therefore cannot be reduced to a belief-system. Feeling the power of each shruk is a mode of living, a process of transformation.  They burn down the ego. One realizes that the night is dark, and death, imminent—for death has “shattered our youth”—“the way water is absorbed by new clay channels/the way shops are abandoned at closing time.” One waits in the abandoned bazaar—for ruination and complete desolation. Since death is universal, no one will be cured without dying. Death is a sense of the passage of time, and preparing for death is such a realization. A powerful shruk tells us about the intimidating quarters of the rich, who shoo poor people away. Beautiful women singing in the palaces, until “dust is being swept with chowries,” and “people grow cotton over there.” Time elapses. It leaves its mark. Ruination is equity. Hence, death before dying is freedom—since to live in such a cataclysmic condition of the outcast leaves nothing intact. But in the process, the ruined one gains a second life in eternity: which is a process of kenotic self-emptying.  Dying before death joins us to one another. The political question of fraternity is passed through the bridge of equality. This is the power of living in death—in transforming individual and common living. Show me Your Face in the Clay La Makan (no place) is the address of the outcast. Solitude is a form of preparation. Slow ruination gradually leads to no-place or nothingness. Ruination is therefore an invitation to poetry—which celebrates the temporal movement in and through life. The bereft is bound to all creatures and to every substance around him—“abandoning existence, I found presence/Thus have I reached the place-less place.” In this section on place-less place in the Rishi tradition, Bazaz deals most intricately and intimately with the question of what is affirming in negative theology—about the relationship between nafi and isbat (a discussion he had already initiated in the introductory pages

A Century Shimmers like a Star-studded Sky

[Amitabh: Samastipur aur anya Kavitaen. New Delhi:Nibandh, 2023] Prasanta Chakravarty The tightrope of real intimacy means trying to cultivate our common capabilities—for life is unembellished, plane and full of unexpected miracles; even in barbarous times: जीवन सपाट सीधा और सरल है | Especially in such times as ours: since all veneer stands exposed. It is the hardest of tasks—to shore easy and unadorned intimacy; walking step by little step with the times, and yet trying to leap across its narrow precincts, with a heart that is too large to accept pettiness, too devastated and restive to remain calm and poised. As the imaginative, mutinous soul brings the full force of intimacy to the reader, it runs the risk of self-exposure. Exposing the self is the obverse of self-indulgent confession. A prophetic minstrel does not skirt time; he confronts it. That is the only way to reveal, and remind, a bewildered humanity of the live and mobile collective forces that throb around us. We refuse to acknowledge, and participate in, acts of common humanity. So the poet hammers home the humble and forgotten origins of life-force again and again in order to shine light on its wondrous interiors. The poet reminds us that only by losing respectability can one rid oneself of the savage desire to remain relevant for the sake of mere convenience. So, at the very basic level a series of motifs and situations in Amitabh’s maiden anthology concerns not the hypocrisy in our lives, but the apathy that comes from craving good living at any cost. Not apathy, but the frivolity of such an existence. Not frivolity, but a craftiness that is at once cruel and petulant—a devastating cocktail unleashed in public life and personal relationships. With razor sharp irony, he brings forth the smallness of our desires: the kiss turns into a subject of debate (मैंने चुम्बन पर बहस का एक बोल्ड प्रस्ताव दिया), a high-end god with cigarettes on his lips hold-forth in his make-belief paradise(एक देवता का चेहरा याद है मुझे/वे बंगाली थे/ उनकी सिगरेट कभी नहीं बुझती थी), vulture like care-givers wax eloquent over dead workmen (तुम्हारे मृत चहरे में चमक ढूंढ रहे थे), banal celebrations are rife (खुद को ख़तरे से बहार पा रहे सभी खुशनसीब देशवासियों/तुम्हे बहुत बहुत जन्मदिन मुबारक), deep thought is summoned only to call out and cancel others (ख़ारिज करना आसान काम नहीं है/लोगों को ख़ारिज करने से पहले लोग/ गरम समोसे और ठंडी मिठाई मंगवाकर रखते है)| Indeed, as Amitabh imagines, we are not happy with one big sun that has been apportioned for us; we live by little suns of avarice and envy instead (हर मौके के लायक जेब में एकाध सूरज हम रख कर चलें). This phenomenon has percolated even among those who do value other, simpler modes of happiness (मोटा पैसा फिर भी दिन रात उनका पीछा  करता है). Hence, we make sure that our children are kept away from every trace of violence that besets the world, and we keep them away from poetry. Having been fed some rancid fodder, like pigs we prefer to die every hour: (सूअर पालना असंभव हो गया है /सिर्फ मल खाकर मर रहे हैं सूअर). The shepherds—the wise-ones, have deserted us. How do we now relate to our surroundings? We physically live in our mohallas, but our heart and soul lie elsewhere—in some glossy, superior universe: hence the disjunction with our own world. The guilt of this inner desertion has to be either sublimated or disowned tout court, at once with exuberance and cynicism. We are well aware of the nature of the battle-lines, but we refrain from taking sides, hoping to save our little havens. But living actually does not matter to those who wish to save their own skin. No life is sacrosanct, no death disturbs anymore: इनमे से किसी  की भी जान की/तुम्हारे लिए कोई क़ीमत नहीं है/ तुम यह नहीं कहते/तुम बचे हुए हो क्योंकि ये मर सकते हैं/एक दूसरे को मार सकते हैं/ तुम ये नहीं कहते | Sediments of Habit Amitabh is mutinous and ironic, but never a cynic. The poems try to understand the psychology of our times—what beats beneath such apathy? Why such colossal waste? The lynch mob comprises of actual human beings—with sentiments and affections. But do they babble within, unable to communicate or channelize their anger? Do we consider ourselves righteous and beyond smallness? Are we not all vulnerable within: Like the tall palm tree, which stands all powerful and self-contained during day, only to reveal itself as lifeless shadow after dusk? Are long nights necessary from time to time in order to remove distances that separate us? The poet is worried about those who remain for counting the dead, those who die million deaths before dying. Cannibalism breeds in our minds: सारे आदमखोर दिमाग में लड़ते हैं | The metaphor of our times is indoor cricket for the poet—the din is so deafening that the game itself becomes secondary. How has the noise of such communal feelings and homogeneity of hurt identities penetrated our kitchens, classrooms and media desks? Amitabh undercuts constantly the apparently serious business of difference among humans, the superfluity of adult-transactions and arbitrations. We all know that pistols are merely make-belief toys among brothers from childhood—how can they turn against each other? Have we confused toys for real killing machines? Violence lies just on the other side of attachment. Lynching, when the moment comes for one, arrives in the midst of everydayness (जब तुम हमारी जान लेने घर में दाखिल होवोगे /हम तुम्हे खली चौकी पर चिंतामग्न पड़े हुए मिलेंगे) | There is nothing dramatic about dying—it is as unadorned and simple as living because there is no possibility of personal mourning anymore (हालांकि की में जानता हूँ इस क़ातिल समय में/शोक मनाने का ये व्यक्तिगत तरीका कोई तरीका नहीं है). One source of the impasse lies in the fact that all conviction is fractured at this time; there are no clear paths for articulation: मेरे पास कुछ यक़ीन है/वे पक्के नहीं हैं |