Arundhati's Choice

The Maoist insurgency has been able to wake their comrades out of deep slumber in Urban India. The intensity of attacks on police and civil society in the name of revolution demanded an unambiguous stand. It’s not just the tribals, who are hostages to the Maoists, society at large had been affected and watch the events with apprehension. That is where the political stance of the vocal champions among erstwhile human rights activists and socialites seizing the moment are viewed with a lot of scrutiny and cynicism. They do not have many admirers anymore as the collective consciousness of Indian body politic has become much more complex and stakeholders from multiple strata of society are actively engaged in their response.

For many the insurgency is an Indian version of a socio-political theater from the late sixties. Wayward violence and anarchic lifestyle then put off their sympathizers among the middleclass communities everywhere. The appeal they had among the Sixties and Seventies youth had vanished gradually as governments in Europe began to shed its fascist vestiges, co-opted socialist principles into democracy and became more inclusive. It also helped that the political issues they championed went out of intelligentsia's radar geopolitically and nationally. Most of them met with individual dead-ends, disillusioned or compromised. The prominence of Absurd Theater and writers like Sartre and Camus signified the dynamic of personal dysfunction and flawed political consciousness of the time.

The mayhem caused by the Weatherman in USA, RZ and RAF (Red Army Faction) in Germany is a forerunner of the terrorist methodology now. However it was interesting to see their relationship with the PLO with whom they got trained to wield arms and participated in multiple plane hijacks. In a way, there was a time when the paths of extreme ideologues from the Left, Islamic Jihadists and liberation theologians’ have crossed purely on the basis of their views of social issues of poverty, depravation and justice. Their cooperation was that of mutual convenience too, as the true nature of their ideologies were glossed over by the heady allure of socialist ideals. Occupations of Vietnam and Israel, compulsive hatred towards the perceived or otherwise fascist disposition of authority, prolific academic (Gramsci, Althuser etc) and underground literature provided the impetus to take charge.

Revolution is being used interchangeably for the Maoist violence in India, which has Germany, Vietnam and Israel rolled into one. International outlets for liberal left (Universities, BBC, NewYork Times, NPR etc) have given succor and much coveted recognition to the activists to carry out their anti-government propaganda. Suddenly encounter deaths, Gujarat, Kashmir independence movement and minority persecution are not that important anymore. Narratives have begun to pour in print, television and internet about the murky world of big corporate, looting politicians and colluding media barons. Marxian polemic is replaced with human rights harangue while unapologetically blinkered about the objectives of Maoist and Islamic fundamentalists. It’s rather easy to say that if either of these militant group had their way, the first casualty would be secular democracy and the subsequent liquidation of Left activists for who they are – Infidel or rotten elite. V.S.Naipaul (Among the Believers) observed in the aftermath of Iranian Revolution - Ayatollah Khomeini, having hoodwinked left wing activists in the west during his exile in France, pulled the fundamentalist curtain on his communist backers right after Shah was overthrown. Similarly Maoists might not be able to resist an urge to cleanse the country of class enemies even if they belong to the radical chic.

The spectacle of conflict is played out in Indian homes through television and internet. Here is where people like Arundhati Roy, Vijay Prasad, Gautam Navlakha et al who have embedded themselves in academies and highbrow careers, target specific political entities and espouse chosen ideology to paint everything in black and white. In the end infintely complex issues get reduced to empty rhetoric on identity versus class conflict. But unlike Eighties and Nineties, when Marxist comrades controlled the print media and universities, internet age liberated a different variety of literate middleclass who grew up to call their bluff, challenge their ideology and more importantly recognize them for who they are – pompous elites with a rigid sense of social hierarchy and territory.

Home minister Chidambaram recognizes this. His pointing to the Left Activists as the reason for his inaction is a tactic to discredit the government’s most shrill critics who are diplomatic liability having access to international opinion space. While this is shrewd in its quest for public opinion, it is dangerous too, as more and more civilians and Police personnel get killed. Both sides are imposing intellectual dhimmitude on public discourse instead of full disclosure and understanding.

In the film Baader-Meinholf complex (2008), the hyper-activist Gudrun Ensslin accused the Marxist polemicist Ulrike that she had theorized too much to evade real action. Ulrike Meinholf, a popular journalist too, presented the introspective voice which acknowledged the darker shades of means and motives of revolutionaries. Ulrike was challenged to make a crossover to become a guerilla. She eventually did exactly that, for which she ultimately paid by taking her own life.

When I learn that Ms. Roy has moved to the other side to report, eulogize and now daring the government to arrest her, the natural question is would Ms. Roy do an Ulrike redux? Or is there too much at stake not to cross that threshold?

Note: Among the Believers, an islamic journey (V.S. Naipaul),Film - Baader-Meinholf complex

Danton's Vigil

The romance of revolution is nothing but a camouflage for the fear of great turmoil and the beginning of tyranny in another name. The history of revolutions taught us at least as much. French, Russian and countless other revolutions - big and small trampled on humanity in general in their sway. Some say what’s happening in Iran is nothing short of a revolution. But you can feel the apprehensions of mutineers palpable in the million tweets and blogs as they go wave after wave against the children of Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah.

Watching Danton (Andrej Wajda, 1983) once again convinced me of the power of cinema - how it lends clarity to viewers' vague apprehensions and insights into the shifting sands of human frailty and lessons in history. I watched it late at night fighting sleepy eyes and thunderous rain drumming away on the roof. I remember power going off before and after Danton's ominous speech on how revolution devours its own children.

It wasn't that difficult to lay doubt on the evil lurking behind best of the goodwill in even among the finest of political systems. When I watched the movie in late 1989, Indian political arena too was undergoing unprecedented upheavals with the right wing BJP making strides in the electorate, V.P Singh introducing caste inspired identity politics and a more than jaded congress delved in open communal politics throwing the country into greater turmoil.

The world too was in the throes of change. Berlin wall was torn down. Soviet Union abandoned Afghanistan. Pakistan cashed in on its mercenary bounty as it kicked the aggro on India by several notches. East Europe unwound from the communist dictators. Prague spring culminated in the winter of Moscow.

Danton was still laughing - pulling down the delectable dinner from the table which he arranged so carefully for Robespierre. Yet you could see the earnestness in his eyes, almost pleading with his friend for justice with whom he wrote the cornerstone of French revolution - Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Danton arrived in Paris to convince Robespierre of the perilous path he had set the country into. Liberator has turned into another dictator in the name of humanity. Having recognized the monster, Danton allowed himself to be caught and tried in the tribunal in order to address the people of France on the nemesis of modern times - dictatorships and the tyranny of the "righteous".

Gerard Depardieu, who played Danton leaves a long shadow over everyone in the movie including the viewers who are caught up in the drama - just like the desperate Desmoulins raging at his own ideals, scared of the guillotine and longing for a life with his newborn baby and distraught wife. He forewarned each one of us to be on constant vigil for our own sake - so that you and I may not become a tyrant or a victim of our own devices.

Mathrubhumi

A few months back, a dear friend subscribed Mathrubhumi magazine in my name. After a gap of more than ten years the magazines sealed carelessly in plastic covers had begun to sail towards me crossing oceans.

It wasn't dejavu this time, even as I opened the first magazine in exhilaration trying to reach across the other side of a reader's memory. I can recall the places I'd been when I read some of the landmarks printed in Malayalam. More than the reference-worthiness, what fascinated me was its ability to provoke curiosity and earnestness to causes bigger than oneself without being elitist.

M.T. Vasudevan Nair used to write editor's note for a while. He wrote about child labor and how Chekhov's Vanka pained his conscience. Another note quoted the Indian chief's profound and poetic letter to the great white chiefs in Washington of his fears for the fragile ecosystem and the dying earth's providence. That was when O.V. Vijayan's eco-fiction Madhuram Gayati had begun serializing in Mathrubhumi.

Earlier, scholar and poet N.V. Krishna Warrier led the editorial team. I could sense their quite confidence and brilliance in the way they put out the magazine and paved way for intelligent and insightful discourses. I couldn't have known Nitya or Octavia Paz or Brodsky the way I did had it not been the space given to independent thinkers in the pages of the magazine.

Another major attraction was the illutrations of A.S and Nampoothiri who complemented writers' imagination and more often than not surpassed readers' mental image of the landscapes and characters.

Somehow the magazine managed to complement my eclectic and random reading delightfully. I still remember reading Kamala Das's childhood memoir and V.K.N's inimitable Payyan tales. Same pages had varied and unique voices of the world - Axel Munthe, V.S Khandekar, Sunil Gangopadhyaya, Bhishma Sahni and Marquez who romanticized his own private cinema paradiso in the rickety movie halls in Bogota.

The reappearance of this magazine in another shore isn't connecting with me. May be I am left behind. Or I am more into connecting the dots between NPR radio and nytimes.com now. Since the primary readers of Mathrubhumi live faraway, their perception of reality and worldview is now circumstantially remote.

Yet I am indebted to my friend who cared way more than I ever did to do this for me. Thank you P.K.

The Path of the Prophet: Triumph of defeat

Charioteer from the epic - charioteer, the Prophet spoke to the brokenhearted traveler: “Kurukshethra was never finished.”

Traveler asked: “When does Kurukshethra become complete?”

Charioteer smiled. He said: “We have learnt that when you take absolute away from itself, absolute remains. However when you stack absolute over absolute, it transcends itself.” Charioteer continued: “absolute is nothing but a dimension involving space and time. Human spirit cannot traverse the transcendental . Even their quantum mathematics is scared of accepting the challenge. However the "transcendental absolute", in times of great uncertainty becomes one of us - it takes birth and dies. Look…

Auschwitz, the city of gas chambers where tens of thousands of Jews were charred to death. In the gloom of human sacrifices, Christ’s newly weds, nuns knelt down in the glimmer of a lone candle light and chanted:

“O Virgin Mary, O Mother of god
Pray for us sinners, now and all the time.”

Piercing through the blinding walls, the Prayer in the face of evil became the prayer of all human tribes. The candle light flickered on the walls. The seeker was aghast at the nail marks left behind by Jews as they wrote the last musical notes of mortal pain as they died exhaling the gas. The king with the crown of thorn wailed from his cross: “My brothers! Would I ask my maker to punish you for the guilt of not recognizing me? Why do my priests allege the guilt of vengeance on me? My lord! But the cup of accusation is more unbearable. “

The chants of nuns became mourning: “O Virgin Mary, the most merciful, let this prayer be with the testament written in the agony of your son.”

The flame of love - presence of a martyr. The atom of love cleanses the sins of a world bent on destroying, and lends freedom to the galaxy of stars. The chariot rolled on. Presently it finds itself in the valley of golden apples. Charioteer asked the traveler: “Do you remember these trees?”

“I do. The forbidden fruit of knowledge.”

“With all due respect, you didn’t get it right! Sin and punishment are nothing but a fiction of make-believe fear. By eating these fruits you cannot get knowledge but learn all the tricks to create toys and weapons. In His creation there is only love, no schemes to punish.”

The children of humans who ate the fruits of tricks built up empires. They erected fortresses of technology, architected toy houses to fornicate and giant armories to wage wars. The competed among themselves to grab the lion share. The footprints of the Prophet who walked away unnoticeably from their insatiable lust were upturned.

Traveler asked the man clad in nothing but a loin cloth who waited alongside the highway to freedom: “why are you eating nothing but leaves.?”

“This is my food - fallen leaves. I walk by the benevolent avatar Kali without troubling vegetation or animals.”

The seeker asked: “You walk in loin clothes, sustain life with leaves - aren’t you losing it all?”

“Yes”

“Why?”

“Look yonder…”

Tribes and castes clamored to fight each other! Kurukshethra is replete with apocalyptic arsenals. Gita author confesses at the end of each cycle of Kurukshethra. The final stanzas of the prophecy were silenced to obscurity by the roar that rose from the parade for weapons of mass destruction: Maa Nishada! Do not kill! Isn’t the defeat of a loin clothed fakir preferable?

* * *

"an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind" - Gandhi spoke as he squatted in Naokhali, he knew he was confronting the medieval monster. Anybody who took him for a fool underestimated his awareness of the epic sweep of subcontinental history . He demanded a secular fiber from the Jehadi, called his attention to non violence and co-existence. He knew he was waging a lone campaign against a million revolts in the name of Gods strewn across centuries.

Martin Luther King made a choice. Nelson Mandela couldn't have taken another path to freedom. Gandhi's one man act reminded Indians to choose life over death. Didn't we know that already?

The Path of the Prophet: the revelations

Reading O.V. Vijayan prompted me to pick up on the theme of India as an Idea. I keep going back to random pages of his “The Path of the Prophet (1992)” and marvel at the insights on offer. And I have not been reading much of late.

Vijayan was a unique voice you wouldn’t find clamoring for attention, especially among the mountain of schmaltzy Diasporas, or post colonial master servant dichotomies or countless other broadsides heaped on India. His career as a cartoonist and having lived in Delhi during the tumultuous decades of Indian experiment of democracy and nationhood elicited quite a number of stand out observations from him.

Vijayan saw India essentially as a conflation of many ideas left behind by millennial prophets from the Vedic period, the Buddha, Nabi, Christ, Nanak, Marx and Gandhi. Their ancient and modern manifestations are alive in unexpected corners in violent and sometimes harmonious fashion. As you travel in time through centuries long strife you sense the kind of dejavu that accompanies a fatalistic realization of this land’s survival from invasions. Vijayan set the backdrop of the book a few years and days into the murder of Indira Gandhi and the subsequent butchering of Sikhs in Delhi.

Narayanan - Vijayan’s alter ego in the book narrates the story of his father who imparted the wisdom of Gita, which he acquired from the world war I as a soldier when he lay down under the benevolence of small pox bacteria.

“First world war - In the sand dunes of Mesopotamia and in the legendary banks of Tigris and Euphrates, my father fought. Narayanan listened to the story snuggling in the lap of his father. The soldiers squatted in the trenches they dug in the dirt and sand and meditated on the love they left behind. Meanwhile a procession of another tribe was crossing their path - an exodus in search of Promised Land.

“Do you know who were they, Nanoo?” Asked his father and he answered himself: “they were bacteria on their journey from another battlefield, to get some rest.” Father contracted the pox bacteria. Fellow soldiers insisted that their ill compatriot couldn’t be allowed to stay inside the trench in order not to spread the disease. They wanted him shot and thrown into the cauldron of summer fire. Their commander, Capt. Gurmit Singh stopped them. He took father over to a tin shed and kept a leather pouch-full of water in it. On his way back to the trench, he was shot and killed by enemy fire.

In a soldier’s language, father explained the stories of the battles and retreats of bacteria as if they were yet another enunciation of Gita: Mankind is the disease of this earth - just like them, bacteria the micro mankind - they travel, discover, migrate - make tribal empires, civilizations, literature, art and entertainment. That indeed becomes our disease.”

* * *

Josef, Narayanan’s friend bemoans the fate of his former communist radical friends in prison who are awaiting death sentence: “They will come out. Staring death in its face and building the mystery of an exotic death have nothing in common. I can‘t really imagine what will they become at the very last moment!”

Martyrdom is only for those who accept God as their father. Like the crucifixion of Christ, only a soul can claim real martyrdom. How can enzymes and proteins claim martyrdom? When communists die, it will be reported in pamphlets and notices as mere deaths - meaningless deaths! A few things disintegrate and vanish around you - dreams, truth, periods of history, masteries sewn up in fat leather jackets. In the end, what left would be a glimmer of one’s own solitude and a short distance across. The human, bereft of civility and compassion stands alone, crumbles apart into minerals and chemicals, becomes one’s own prophet and speaks gibberish… Bhagat Singh was reading Lenin’s autobiography into the last few days of his life. What would an individual sentenced to death, pick up from such a book? Bhagat Singh and his comrades were moving towards a grand boundary. What was that lay beyond the fence? Each one of the prophets passed by, asking the same question.


* * *

While Sikh uprising troubled northern India, Narayanan met with Sujan Singh, a world war veteran and a taxi driver in Delhi - with whom he shared some of his thoughts and fears. During one of the rides, Sujan Singh as he takes the Journalist Narayanan to Rasuyi where a roadside death needed to be reported decides to call on Indian democracy:

Sujan Singh said: “this is just a beginning, Saab. Mark my word. Soon the country will fall into the hands of lawless goons. One of them has been shot dead in the middle of the road, in Rasuyi.”

Thugs have grabbed a nation of majestic lineage. People cheer on as triumphant plunderers flaunt their crowns, while the thief finds himself in the palace, feasts on left over from the empire, stands tall on the empire’s stilts and advice its simple subjects.

“The ruling class in India” Sujan Singh continued: “what they need is short respites, for that they will sacrifice Punjab.”

“Remember, we do not have an enemy to fight anymore. There won’t be another Bangladesh, most likely another nuclear test.”

“Or else a genocide!”

Note: The text in Italics is original translation by me. To keep the discussion on track, I 've selected the pieces randomly from the book. Another part to follow...

India's unfinished business with Pakistan

India was supposed to be an idea - a final destination for many a weary traveler seeking an enlightening unknown and for many others a final frontier queer enough to conquer, loot and crush. To think about the world's most populous democracy and emerging economy in medieval light seemed totally out of place in times of globalization, until a week ago.

Terrorists emerged from the gateway of India to inflict untold pain on the psyche of an ancient India decked in new age garb. It could've been Ghazni's mercenaries cutting through Khyber pass on their way to a million savageries no matter how many times they had been rebuffed and magnanimously offered their lives back. They return with greater brutality, wilier deception and a malicious smile at the weakness of their opponent.

Centuries have hard wired the orgasmic passion for violence on the wild things and their offspring who lived westwards of Khyber. Ever since Genghis Khan legitimized the philosophy of kill to live, central Asia was nothing but killing fields for the organized mercenaries. Islam has tagged itself on to it later as merely a context to vanquish the other a.k.a infidels. India was always the final frontier for the motivated. Unfortunately it still is the same.

Even after repeated defeats in wars and proxy wars at the hands of a democratic India, even after the country had been split into two, even after world's rapt attention on the failure of their own state, Pakistanis are in a perpetual denial of reality. The abyss shown by Pakistan's forerunner, Afghanistan was never enough for the plotters in that country to doubt what destiny has in store. For them this is supposed to be a small phase, in fact an insignificant price to pay for the greater and purer Pakistan notwithstanding what they are up against. During nineties they were executing their plans meticulously with an insipid secular Congress government in power, belligerent but wayward right wingers in opposition, China in tow, splintered Soviet union and an indifferent U.S.A run by big mouth liberals from the left.

Kargil war was supposed to be the beginning of the end. It was, but in a direction that wasn’t anticipated. World events, pivoting around America's war on terror, realignment of "rogue" elements with Al-Qaeda and Palestine's political obliteration led the international attention eventually towards Pakistan. Iraq war has been nothing but Bush's miscalculation and a distraction.

The raison de'etre for Pakistani Army is its unfinished business with India. They antagonized and bled India in every available opportunity. They experimented with democracy and international institutions (major supplier of soldiers to U.N peace keeping missions) to thwart Indian diplomatic efforts, aligned military institutions including ISI with Jehadists who had no regional ambitions to challenge India with frugal resources. However the global war on terror, while Jehadis looking to usurp power and Taliban on the run complicated the equations.

Thus it's become an unfinished business of India to dismantle Pakistani terror camps, cut down the Pakistani monolith - Armed forces and destroy their borrowed/stolen nukes.

Free falling free market and McCain's message

When I looked around to buy a house in the land of opportunities during the last quarter of year 2005, I couldn’t help wondering about the apparent but glossed over disconnect between real estate prices and real buying power of average Americans. House prices spiked dramatically at the rate of 200 percent in less than a year. Mortgage lenders and developers sprang up everywhere. Having exhausted those with a credit history, they turned their attention towards the softer underbelly of the population - barely legal immigrants and job hopping victims of credit card vultures. To grant them entry into the brave new American dream, their benefactors provided an opening in the name of deferred principle and interest rates a.k.a sub-prime mortgage. In time reality set in - bills began to show up with their true numbers. Occupiers of the houses fled abandoning their unsolicited dreams.

The word spread rapidly. Foreclosure signs began to appear in neighborhoods. Soon everyone understood what Katrina had forewarned. Once the canopy of denial is flung open, you know the dweller of the pretty home across the street was a poor man made homeless by greed.

But what I didn’t realize like everyone else then was the depth to which housing speculators had dug their hands to fund the project to build a home for every decent and hard working American. Insurance companies, mutual funds, investment bankers had all diverted funds into the project to make some fast buck. Its unreal to think that companies like Lehman Brothers and Investment banks like Washington Mutual which survived the great depression of 1930s would go belly up with a day’s notice. Insurance giant AIG is propped up by the Federal government for now. So are Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. Retirement funds and other savings are at risk to send shivers through many an aging bones.

Most significant fallout of all this is its worldwide impact. China made major investment in U.S market. So are the Japanese, Germans and Oil barons in the middle east. Even ICICI bank in India had a major investment in Lehman Brothers. Stock markets around the world have been shaken by this quake which may not have reached its highest point yet.

At the core of this problem is the sustained implementation of Republicans’ conservative ideologies on government’s role in capital market and legitimization of corporate greed. Reagonomics of deregulation and huge tax cuts and credits to big corporations were continued for the past two decades with republican dominated senate and congress even though Clinton, a conservative liberal was president during its time of bliss. Another aspect of republican politics is its clever and tactical use of wedge issues such as abortion and gay rights with biblical references to undercut criticisms from the left on its economic policies, especially during elections. Clearly, the Republicans favor rich folks who need geopolitical and logistical opportunities to make their billions since we now know a lot more about Enron adventures in third world countries, tax credits for self-serving Oil corporations and how Iraq became a goldmine for Halliburton. Deregulation is the toast of the time and yet the number of career politicians accused of corruption and behind bars are increasing.

There is a significant section of Americans who are blissfully unaware of world’s perception of themselves. They fear change and embrace status-quo. For them there is no creature more disgusting and revolting than a liberal democrat who is out to increase tax and unleash gays into their private Christian lives. They do not care a fig about the world and they truly believe that the war in Iraq is convenient and after all things considered Pakistan is still an ally. Drop names like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid - they’ll run to polling booth to vote for a serial killer under republican column.

It is important to note that the sternest opposition to W. Bush‘s $700 billion bail-out plan has come from the Republicans and not Democrats. They are worried about facing impending senatorial and congressional elections and the real possibility of owning up a greater depression if things took a turn for the worse. No wonder Republican presidential hopeful McCain is doing everything he can to usurp the message of change from Obama. He lived most of his life during the cold war era and appears to be cruising in a time machine inexorably into the past. He admitted several times that he has no clue on economy and he would rather spend his time on foreign policy. Engaging in geopolitical conflict a.k.a war economics is after all a Republican contribution to humanity. Given that depression is unofficially declared, McCain’s military Keynesianism is just what the doctor order to secure this damn world.

Celebrating Folk Art

It seemed like a long time ago when time was still timeless, I had an affliction of color and sound. My mind for the first time, was registering the overwhelming play of bright colors and engrossing sounds of yearly festival at the temple in our neighborhood. Even the color of candies which the seasonal peddlers stacked upon their makeshift stalls added an ethereal sheen on the phantasmal vision unfolded in front of my eyes.

The soothsayer song in praise of snake deities, loud and stout looking actors on stage enacting extra-terrestrial battles from Ramayana and Mahabharata , the balloon man with his mobile paraphernalia - those were the early connectors to the heritage of the land and expressions of a world order that defied the onslaught of time as long as they did.

It was much later when I began to notice earthier and rather primordial forms of folk art such as Ayyappan Paattu, songs in praise of Dravidian gods (Muthappan, Vishnumaya) along the sidelines of flashier performing arts. In them, deep down I could sense a sort of cathartic realization of individual and collective dreams and fears which otherwise would have never ever made it out of the subconscious domain or exploded into something sinister and dark.

The national festival of Kerala - Onam was borne out of a folk legend and an occasion to celebrate all sorts of folk arts - ritualistic and secular (such as Tiger dance, Kummatti Kali etc). More than its significance as an age-old tradition, Onam brought up a grand setting for people to celebrate life and revel in others' joy.

Some of the shapes and forms I have seen in the traditional settings of Kerala were intense enough to let go on my growing apprehensions of the general lack of development and modernity in the state's social life. The richness of the folk art easily filled the wide gaps of general deprivation and the prevalence of snobbery among the audience and practitioners of classical arts. Often I have marveled at the striking similarity of Theyyam and Kathakali in their costumes and how Theyyam invariably breaks into bouts of cries as opposed to the finesse of aural and literary tradition of Kathakali. The social dynamic at work here was too stark to pass up.

The dialectics in folk art has been cleverly adopted and manipulated by political strategists, especially the communists who engrained their ideology in seemingly innocuous and subtle variations of folk music practiced and enjoyed by workers in the fields. Later on popular poets used the structure and sounds of folk music to lend an exciting latitude of folk imagery and unexpected dimension to their art. Listening to such poems in their native languages like Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali etc have become a unique experience. Translating them would not have made any sense at all.

However the most impressive of all folk arts has always been music. The rhythm and sounds of folk music have a rare ability to cut through the carefully manicured fences of culture and language. The aspirations of common folks rising in unison resonate naturally with their ilk around the world and touch hearts in a unique way - whether it is a group of Moravian gypsies assembled in a tavern, a Texan singing Americana, a Baul singer walking down the beaten fields or a bunch of farmers somehwere in a nondescript islet in Kuttanad, rhapsodizing the season of harvest and pleasures of simple unhurried life of yore.

Living in a time when Hypermodernity and globalization are often confused and utterly inadequate terms to describe human and to a great extend mother earth’s conditions, folk art may be able to offer much needed healing for our electrocuted humanity. Although we will never return to the refuge of rural and agrarian setting, there can be only simple solutions for our complicated problems.

I remember reading Milan Kundera as he spent an entire chapter to discuss folk music and modern society. He spoke about men being weary under the weight of their own ego and mistrust of their identity:

...and I felt happy within these songs, in which sorrow is not reckless, laughter is not crooked, love is not ridiculous and hate is not apprehensive, where people love with their bodies and souls, where they draw knives or sabres in hatred, dance in joy, throw themselves into the Danube in despair, where, for that matter, love is still love and pain is still pain, where the original emotion is not yet devoid of itself and where values are still unravaged; and it seemed to me that within these songs I was at home, that I had my roots in there. That their world was my primal point of reference... (from Joke)

* * *

Notes:

Some of the most evocative use of audio and visual expositions of folk arts have been employed in popular and offbeat Indian movies - Aravindan's Kummatty comes to my mind. The entire film was based on a folk tale with a rousing treat of folk music. Nokkukuthi (scarecrow) was another experimental effort based on M. Govindan's poem depicting a ballad. Other folk arts like the popular Theyyam, Kalam paattu have always had their place in popular movies. Mani Kaul did a documentary on Rajasthani puppetry and a film Duvidha, based on a folk tale.

Info on Kummatti here

In Light Of India

A review on In Light of India: Octavio Paz.

It rained.
The hour is an enormous eye.
Inside it, we come and go like reflections.
The river of music
Enters my blood.
If I say body, it answers wind.
If I say earth, it answers where?

The world, a double blossom, opens:
Sadness of having come,
Joy of being here.

I walk lost in my own center.

As a reader I couldn’t help but notice Paz’s polemics on existential and reflective differences between civilizations and how oriental was time as a concept in his poems and other writings. His inimical vision of history as an imagination of time had had its parallel in ancient Indian philosophies. Isn’t he now being rediscovered for his scathing criticism of modern democracies for their development model and establishments of greed?

Having seen him establish how *Mexican civilization has come to a stasis, forgo a glorious culture to withdraw into oneself and self-deprecatingly look up to its neighbor in the north, it was fairly easy to recognize Octavio Paz’ affinities and opinions on India in his book – In Light of India. (* from Labyrinth of Solitude)

As anyone who visited India would vouch, India gets through your senses much before brain begins to register all your pre-conceived notions of her. You will realize that the teeming reality around you will soon blur its contour to leave you in daze. Paz spoke about the India he encountered in the bustling streets of Bombay of yore:

“I put my things in the closet (at Hotel Taj Mahal), bathed quickly, and put on a white shirt. I ran down the stairs and plunged into the streets. There, awaiting me, was an unimagined reality:

Waves of heat; huge grey and red buildings, a Victorean London growing among palm trees and banyans like a recurrent nightmare, leprous walls, wide and beautiful avenues, huge unfamiliar trees, stinking alleyways,

Torrents of cars, people coming and going, rivers of bicycles,

in the doorway of a shack, watching everyone with indifference an old man with a noble face,

Another beggar, four half-naked would-be saints daubed with paint, red beetel saints on the side walk,

Turning the corner, the apparition of a girl like a half opened flower,

Stalls selling coconuts and slices of pineapple, ragged vagrants with no job and no luck, a gang of adolescents like an escaping herd of deer,

A magnificent eucalyptus in the desolation of a garbage dump, an enormous billboard in an empty lot with a picture of a movie star,

More decrepit walls, whitewashed walls covered with political slogans written in red and black letters I couldn’t read,

As night fell I returned to my hotel, exhausted…but my curiosity was greater than my fatigue. I went out again into the city. I found many white bundles lying on the side walks: men and women who had no home…I saw monsters and was blinded by the flashes of beauty. I strolled through infamous alleyways and stared at the bordellos and little shops: painted prostitutes and transvestites with glass beads and loud skirts. I wandered toward Malabar Hill and its serene gardens.

Paz goes back to his hotel, but decides to take another walk towards the coast and there he tries to take inventory of all that he had seen, heard, smelled and felt. He thought of dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea and an inescapable attraction to explain his state of mind as a young barbarian poet.

If we chop and change some images here and there, I guess the contemporary India despite the double digit economic growth would not be too far away. Paz gets down parsing his newly found exhilaration in the rest of the book which took decades to complete. You don’t read Octavio Paz for your academic exercise, do you? You read for his insights and sometimes opinions which you may or may not agree.

Even in the opening chapter we can see Paz’s sense of history and his uncanny ability to glean valid archetypes. According to him, wandering in New Delhi is like passing through the pages of Victor Hugo, Walter Scott or Alexander Dumas and that it was the most ancient of cities - Indraprastha of the epic Mahabharatha where legendary battles of power and ethics played out; and also of the serene Muslim mausoleums. He writes about the unforgettable moment when he wandered into a tiny empty mosque whose walls were made of marble and inscribed with passages from the Qur’an. Above, the blue of an impassive and benevolent sky, only interrupted, from time to time, by a flock of green parakeets. He stayed there for hours. According to him it was a vision of the infinite in the blue rectangle of an unbroken sky.

Paz returns as an ambassador to India when he would travel around the country and write East Slope, a collection of poems on Indian themes. He would also talk about his experiments in collaborative poetry with Agyey and Shrikant Verma on Friendship. He gave Lecture on India upon Rajiv Gandhi’s behest and eight years later he would revisit the paper to write In Light of India although he makes no claim of anything in particular. And yet the book is a treasure for its insights and tenacity to seek answers in an unfinished quest.

Rama and Allah

Paz is incisive when he speaks about the coexistence of the two religions that are strikingly at extremes as one being the richest and most varied form of polytheism and other, the strictest and most extreme form of monotheism. He observes how the two communities retained their identities without any fusion and that the Muslim invasion happened in India long after the decline of Islamic civilization. He further observes that Sufi mysticism triggered a literary tradition in northern India. Similarly there was a Bhakti movement which sought to imbibe some of the radical patterns from Sufism and anti-orthodox Hindus.

Kabir is the son of Allah and Rama. He is my Guru, he is my pir…Tagore translated Kabir’s poems because in Kabir’s Unitarian vision he had seen a failed promise of what India could have become.

Paz doesn’t miss out on the contributions of Akbar and Dara Shikoh, especially to think that Darah Shikoh’s translation of Upanishads into Persian eventually ended up in Schopenhauer’s desk which in turn sparked the evolved minds of Nietzsche and Emerson! However the period of enlightenment was followed by dark years of Aurangzeb who single-handedly was responsible for the fault lines between Hindus and Muslims which had repercussions for ages and still echoing. Paz had noticed that the East India Company had never interfered with the social fabric or religious identities of Indians, they in fact exploited the conditions to their advantage. However the notion of nationhood was an idea given to the Indians by their former rulers.

Another aspect of the book is Paz’s interesting take on Caste system in India. This much derided Indian artefact and often times confused with racism is seen in a different light. Paz uses it to understand the social fabric of Hindu community in tune with their philosophy based on Karma. He acknowledges the critics of caste system in India and the dogma of untouchablity, but he warns the gentle souls out there who are horror-stricken by the word caste to not to miss the ancient hypotheses of cosmic order and how time is an illusion (maya) that eventually delivers those suffering in the cycles of birth and death.

Modern Indian History

Paz pays attention to all the regular names from the recent history of India: Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Subhash Bose, Gandhi, Nehru, V.K.Krishna Menon, M.N. Roy. Of these V.K.Krishna Menon and M.N.Roy need special mention. V.K. Krishna Menon, according to Paz was a malignant influence on Nehru who ultimately proved to be a fatal union for Nehru.

Menon was an arrogant and intelligent man, but, as so often happens with the proud, he was not the master of his own ideas: he was possessed by them. Nehru was never able to recuperate from the disaster of his foreign policy.

Reading Paz’s chronological account of M.N. Roy’s many political volte-face especially with the benefit of hindsight that we have when seen from this far in time, I couldn’t but be spellbound by Paz’s understanding of political history and ability to recognize probably the only genuine political mind to have emerged from India ever to make any impact on International political history.

M.N. Roy, an extreme nationalist inspired by Marx, was pursued closely by the British Intelligence, traveled to Chicago and later during First World War sought asylum in Mexica where he was instrumental in founding the communist party. Impressed by Roy’s activities and skill, Lenin invited him to participate in the third International and made him its agent in Central Asia and China. He broke up with Comintern and Marxism itself. He returned to India and fought for Indeopendence, spent years in Jail, however during Second World War supported allied force having realized the threat Nazism posed rather than being a cohort of Gandhi or Subhash Bose. After the war, convinced that the totalitarian system founded by Lenin and Bolsheviks was a disaster, he invented Radical humanism as a revolutionary response to the crisis of socialism.

M.N. Roy’s philosophy may have been inadequate, yet Paz’s brilliant sketch of his political genius in a few strokes might not be found in Kosambi’s tomes.

The project of nationhood

You can also find that Paz is aware of the emergence of right wing Hindu nationalist party B.J.P and the re-ignition of Hindu-Muslim divide. Although Paz acknowledges the inherent secular and moderate nature of Hindus, he observes how the radicalization of Hidnus started with Tilak and later consolidated by Savarkar which resulted in the bye-product of neo-Hinduism (Hinduthva) that envisions a monolithic concept of Hinduism united territorially and devoid of caste barriers hitherto unknown to the history-less Hindu culture. Drawing from his own history of Mexican nationalism, Paz has words of caution for the nationalists for their penchant for straight jacketing the identity of the acceptable and the abominable:

All this would be funny were it not frightening. Nationalism is not a jovial god: it is Moloch drunk with blood…In India many nationalisms live together and they are all fighting with one another. One of them, Hindu nationalism, wants to dominate the others and subject them to its law – like an aurengazeb in reverse. Another, in Kashmir wants the state to unite with a hostile nation, Pakistan – thus ignoring the lesson of Bangladesh.

Citing Shabano case to describe the weakness of secular politics when when Rajiv Gandhi overturned court order to defy constitution and earlier when Indira Gandhi showed how excessive polarization of power at the center could corrupt, Paz believes that the quest for Indian political and national identity should still be that of secularism and democracy with a constant vigil against disruptive tendencies and political expediency. Having seen the disasters of socialists’ totalitarian regimes in South America and the fate of nations built on military triumphs, Paz could not have suggested otherwise.

Contraptions of Time

Paz delves into the medieval and Vedic literature at length to point out the extent of erotic art, its strict adherence to structure (meter) and the absence of the notions of sin unlike their western equivalents. He ponders on the four branches of Vedic thoughts and attempts to find parallels in western thoughts and traditions. For e.g Genesis and the Rig Vedic postulation on the origin of the world and of humanity, or like the stanza from Atharva Veda which said: “Time Created the Lord of Creatures, Parajapati.” Further from Atharva Veda: “Desire (Kama) was the first to be born. Desire arose in the beginning which was the first seed of thought.” Sex is regarded as a vital force in Indian thought which looks at Life as energy which possessed the power to regenerate (a major school of ritual oriented vision of life – Tantric philosophy). However the enlightened man understands that while pleasure is a goal, is finite and it does not save us from death or free us from future incarnations. He seeks the path of abstinence and solitary meditation. Chastity gives strength for the great battle: breaking the chain of rebirths.

Paz expounds the teachings of Bhagavat Gita and Buddha in order to explain the two differing yet eventually unifying concepts on purpose of Life and living. However I was looking forward to the last segment of the chapter patently titled: Contraptions of time where he famously stated (from Nobel lecture): Every Civilization is a vision of time. Consequently the seeming staticity of Indian life is explained by the concept of time where it rejects the linear reality as Maya and the real reality is Brahman (Absolute Being) and at its depth, Atman (Self). Thus man is simultaneously impermanent as cosmos and unreal as an apparition. Paz looks at this as a metaphysical and social negation of time. According to him the first prevented the birth of literary, scientific and philosophical genre we call history, while the second gave birth to the institution of castes, immobilized society. He extends this theory to reason why the Hindu societies have viewed the European invasions as mere dissonances in the larger scheme of cyclical passage of time. However this century old equilibrium has been disturbed with the advent of modernity among the elites and now the ever pervasive middleclass in India.

Paz ends his book with his quest of answers for the questions India posed to him, midway with a scathing attack on the capitalist’s model of development and the now forgotten solution put forward by Gandhi. Gandhi’s Gram Swaraj envisioned a billion small villages of farmers and artisans armed with non-violence and Dharma as the contract between civilizations. But population explosion had long thwarted the dream. Every village became a pit of misery and despair. Paz is now seeking a new politics and suggests that the reformation of our civilization must begin with a reflection on time.

I would have never known how personal India been for Paz and how she inspired the finest thinker and writer of our time to tell us what we, the people of India clearly and seemed to me, irrevocably lost!

On Writing

Ironically words are the last thing that comes to mind when thought happens to be on writing. I’ll end up thinking about everything but how it was written. May be this explains why books originally written in languages I can’t hope to learn in a lifetime have a fascination for me.

How can Borges speak through a language he didn’t write while lending that eye to see the constructs of mind of matter in a new light? How about reading Calvino leave a half-begun chuckle on me as I attempt to surmise my own impressions of the cities I thought I’ve lived? How much Russian was Fyodor’s English which I read and found myself aghast at the ways of human mind? How about V.K.N who wrote about contemporary decadent living and politics in India steeped in dynasty and feudal order in the subtext of linguistic and culture setting similar to the baroque of seventeenth century?

Writer as a reader

Derrida while speaking about the analogy between structuralist obsession and the anxiety of language not being accidental, unleashed the force within the act of reading a book. The anxiety of writer is recreated as an event every time when his or her book is read, which is why the readership of creative writers and their take on others’ writings reveal very special and unique sensibilities. Calvino’s ‘Literature machine’ and ‘Why read classics’? come to mind. M.T.Vasudevan Nair’s literary jottings on writers reveal an acquired sensibility that are out there waiting for the seeker. A well read writer carries the spirit of past, present and future, notwithstanding the clever ones who have their hands and designs on the forces of market and socialites.

Insights

“But there is more to Art than the straightness of lines and the perfection of surfaces. Plasticity of style is as large as the entire idea… we have too many things and not enough forms.” – Flaubert.

The most important thing for a writer is to have something to write. Cliched as it sounds, there are any number of us simply love the idea of being a writer. Sometimes one may even find what he could write in the process. But we are talking about the intangible in the act of writing. We’ve had too many instances of losing it in style and pop genres while the most unconventional writer who is the toast of the time being forgotten in a few years. James Joyce and Faulkner infuriated unsuspecting readers no end, yet those who persisted with them had their personal epiphanies. Hermann Hesse’s prose was simple and as clear as a flowing stream, yet he made deep impact on readers world over. Mobydick and Don Quixote were discovered in a new light much later. What makes the books and their writers matter and alive, long after they were all gone?

The stylists among writers may enjoy immediate success. But time will test the real worth of their work eventually. The ones that stood the test underline the fact that craft would be invariably get dated, but not the insights.

Vision

Vision is that rare occurrence in writing. However the visionary writer is not an anomaly or an accident. He or she is but an inheritor of his ancestors’ collective consciousness and pointer to the direction of our future. One can easily delineate the thoughts of Thoreau taking shape in Lawrence Durrell’s art which is outgrown by the Indian writer O.V. Vijayan to write his eco-science fiction ‘Madhuram Gayati’.

Durrell wrote - "Hellenic worlds are replaced here by something different, something subtly androgynous, inverted upon itself. The Orient cannot rejoice in the sweet anarchy of the body - for it has outstripped the body. I remember Nessim once saying - I think he was quoting - that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets - I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex."
(from Justine, part one of the Alexandria Quartet)”

Written during the fag end of eighties, Madhuram Gayati’s germinal could be unmistakably found in Durrell. Vijayan’s book spoke about the earth in an apocalyptical conflict between a submissive feminine hemisphere and a predatory androgynous hemisphere . The references of multinational companies as the only functioning entities, while states were all withered and the greed and fatal spasms of the northern hemisphere seething in unbearable hot weather resonated on many levels as some of them have become much more obvious to us than it was in ealry nineties.

True visionaries are those who care and fear for us, the thoughtless lot.

Writer’s contrivances

If Derrida’s biggest contribution was extending the writer’s paradigm in interpretational and philosophical reading of the text, the next big thing was OULIPO writers’ foray into forms that were nothing but a literary response to the google world of our times. They tore into the everyday and exotic realms alike - architecture, cosmology, word plays (lipograms, crosswords, anagrams, travel notes etc) statistical physics, tarot card reading etc while acutely aware of the vocation of literature. The wild successes of George Perec and Italo Calvino as the rightful inheritors of Borges underline the fact that being clever could never be an option but be and that the knowledgebase of humankind has exploded the average reader’s sensibilities. These new writers have waded in and out of genre writing and experimenation with gay abandon as they mischievously led the unsuspecting readers into grander spectacles. The façade of adapting constraints to build their artifacts didn’t faze their readers’ from recognizing their value.

Perec wrote an 300 page novel devoid of the letter 'e'. His magnum opus, Life A users's manual adapted the literary form's equivalent of the art and science of creating and solving jigsaw puzzles. Italo Calvino wrote If On a Winter's nithgt a traveller artfully crushed and recast the very structure of novel where plot, style, author, ambience, tone and even the reader undergo several mutations that one could easily see that this single book was out to trigger multiple neural response from its reader.

Any or a combination or all of the above strengths may be found in a writer. I would however think that the real strength of a writer shows when he or she stays away while his or her book is read. And When as a writer, you've shed your inhibitions and the clever, egotist and erudite 'You' break the flimsy coordinates of your time and space and appeal to the universal sensibility of a reader, then you will have exercised your strength as a writer.

* On a prod by Amit, I ended up writing a bit of haphazard thoughts. Now, I would hope to see Sunil's take :)

On heart's call

“None of my family members ever had the ability to speak from their heart. The dwellers of that home were like Chinese jars the lids of which were shut tight – they lived without ever letting the other know of their scent or taste”
- Kamala Das (Memoirs)

Women writers in India usually are generally treated as a work in progress or agents-provocateur for things unpopular. They don’t count unless their sexuality is out in the open and its salacity is ridiculed in public and enjoyed in private. The writers’ gender creates an instant compromise of “aesthetic” setting for their readers.

Arundhathi Roy is an unwelcome name in many literary and other quarters. Although there are tons of left leaning activists like her, she invites special attention for having been a writer of semi-autobiographical fiction. Her predecessor, Kamala Das is another writer who courted controversies like night gowns and scythed the vulnerable gender sensitivity of Indian readers. Besides selective residue of her writings in public memory, her public and private uttering blitzed media and social circles.

That her private life being debated threadbare even after she had turned seventy three should give us enough insight into the iron cast template for an Indian writer who happens to be a woman. However if you stick to her writings, especially her poems, short stories and the memoirs from Childhood and later, you would be amazed at her uncanny ability to capture the subtle and nuanced social hierarchy and personal relationships among women and the disarming honesty in portraying human condition in general.

“When we returned from the royal palace, Ammamma (grand mother) told me, that we didn’t have the right to touch any of the residents over there. Ammamma explained to me that their caste and ours were different.

‘What will happen if I touch her highness?’

‘If you did, she would have to undergo ablutions. Aren’t we Nair? Folks belonging to the caste Nair can’t touch them’

Ammamma explained to me about the differences in Hindu castes. Most prominent in the pantheon are Nampoothiri, followed by Thamburan; under them Nair, Thiya, Vettuvar, Pariah, Nayadi (tribes). Poor Nayadi, they could only address us from far away across the rice field without ever making themselves seen: ‘Oh! Her Highness from Nalappat!’

Nayadi were like those unseen birds singing among the wide branches of tall trees. I wanted to see them. However our maidservant of the Thiya caste wouldn’t take me to them as she walked out to dole out rice for charity on our behalf.

‘Little mistress, you’ll shriek in terror if you see them. They look like the crow pheasant, the one that cries out loud all the time. Little mistress, Atiyan (me-the-lowly-one) would never do that.’

Once while serving dinner, when Ammamma leaned over to put poppadum in my plate, I said: ‘Atiyan doesn’t need poppadum.’

Ammamma broke into laughter.

‘Kamala, why do you say Atiyan? You should say ‘I’’

‘But didn’t Valli call herself Atiyan?’

‘Isn’t she of Thiya caste? Kamala is not a Thiya girl.’

‘What is Kamala’s caste?’

‘Haven’t you learned what your caste yet? Well, if you haven’t understood what your caste is, no one would ever be able to make you aware of it.’

I do realize the meaning of her statement now.”

- A childhood in Malabar – A Memoir.

Anyone who could write about untouchables and yet let one’s craft and humanity shine through deserves serious reading. Although Kamala Das has been writing a lot of poems and short stories mostly in English, it was her provoking and controversial autobiography ‘My Story’ took the reading public by storm and probably for the first time, Indian consciousness was needled by feminine assertiveness. Gender politics began to color perception and writer’s personal trivia and utterances took center stage.

That she shocked readers with her bare-it-all amorous adventures and went on to write fiction on lesbian lovers, parallels had been drawn from Kate Chopin to Anais Nin. Kamala Das herself made much of her personal account of own life fictional that it was difficult for a layman to notice the disconnect between a volatile and smoldering personality and the jigsaw of the same writer as a lady of aristocratic and literary lineage, wife of a high official and mother of accomplished professionals. It is also worth knowing that her great uncle Nalappattu Narayana Menon was a renowned Malayalam poet who happened to write a well researched book on sex. Another usual folly is to have been misjudged her to be a feminist writer. It’s rather easy to find how she ingenuously picked her genre and succeeded. Given how fragmented and localized feminism as a movement, imposing activism on gender-specific writing on Kamala Das is missing her sources of creativity and spontaneity of her responses.

Kamala’s memoir on her childhood spent in Calcutta and the traditional and idyllic ancestral home in Malabar – A childhood in Malabar was a book that revealed a rare voice. It spoke about adults’ world through the eyes of a child as it retained the magical frills around the everyday reality of life and living in rural and urban India. One could almost feel the palpable warmth and anxiety of a troubled mind exploring channels to communicate. In that sense, Das wrote with a lot of heart and never shied away from being heart-broken.

She is a rare breed of writer who rode on her heart’s call and boy! weren’t the risks worth taking for the sake of her readers!

Philosophizing Faces

Sometimes I have this intense yearning for a time when I had a vision of things. I could feel that I took off from a certain mental stimulus created in empty space without even a gentle prod. The power of cinema and its instant gratification of such serendipities have given great joy and fortitude to bide the pettiness of everyday life.

The news of Bergman and Antonioni passing away had me thinking about the times when I’d watched their movies and the impact they had on me. And I wondered how many other directors wielded such magic? Tarkovsky, Aravindan..? Incidentally they are all dead. They took high risks for unknown returns, hesitantly like Van Gogh did when he approached color in fear and respect, to discover the splendor of creation, one’s own absorption in what he created; the absorption of his being and of his reason.

As directors, Bergman and Antonioni established communication with the audience not with any sleight of hand with preconceived notions of their forte or market (so to speak), but it happened while they were responding to their own inspiring as well as discouraging stimuli.

Antonioni’s treatment of color and space to push the limits and his accent towards the de-peopled empty shot provided us a glimpse into his penchant for abstraction where he obliterates his characters and eclipses their faces. Or his vision of poetic consciousness revealed through the characters who watch themselves in detachment to sustain a free indirect discourse, or the ‘low language’ of the present day world. Even a non-neurotic character like the director in “Beyond the clouds” was created in a similar cast. The free indirect discourse is the essential form of literature, which Antonioni had successfully achieved through his constructs of cinematographic images.

In Blow Up, Antonioni toyed with viewers and scholars of semiotic studies as he constructed a heavily interpretational and subjective value of reality and how camera is essentially a sensory tool which in the end makes Thomas, the camera wielder and our interpreter of perceived reality to disappear and ends up in the closer still of the corpse. Art of Illusion, as any magician would call it.

Bergman’s obsessive framing of faces is well known. He spoke of Close-Up and human face thus: “Our work begins with human face...The possibility of drawing near to the human face is the primary originality and the distinctive quality of the cinema.”

The visages linger in the ambit of camera to a point where they lose their individual sense of being and begin to resemble the other – resemble by default or by the absence of perceived qualities. Such acts of dissolution and disappearance invariably remind us of Bergman. The incessant train of human faces in Silence, Persona, Autumn Sonata, Cries and Whispers and many other films pass us and vanish into the void where the photogram burns with fear as its only effect. The facial close-up is about both the face and its effacement. Bergman has pushed the nihilism of the face the furthest, which is its relationship in fear to the void or the absence, the fear of the face confronted with its nothingness ala Beckett.

Antonioni and Bergman were the original thinkers who processed and exhibited their thoughts through the medium of cinema. They had more than their fair share of hurdles, baiters and failures – personal and professional. Yet their works had unprecedented impact on philosophical thought and made us aware of the power of cinema. Perhaps what we yearn ever more and in nostalgia would be for a time which allowed such genius to be among us - the living dead.

Note: I have used Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 1 - the movement images freely to drive home my pointless point. Since this is "just" a blog and me being lazy, I have not annotated the text - with all due respect to Deleuze.

*

Sven Nykvist

A perennial late Latif that I am, a visit to doctor’s office would not normally permit me to leaf through the magazines neatly stacked on the table in the middle of the visitors’ waiting room. However this time I picked up a magazine though I knew the nurse would walk in anytime, had time to turn to page three and read an obituary in the obscure corner of news round up. It read – Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist died (Dec, 1922 – Sept, 2006).

It took a while to infer what it meant to me. It certainly was not about personal bereavement, but something relatively abstract, more personal than a bio and literally about seeing inner and outer worlds from the vantage point of the lens underneath the iris.

Sven knew where and when to look through his darkly lens. Of course you would know that more than anyone else when you have Bergman and Tarkovsky in company. How do visuals make you forget the composition, the chromo metrics of lighting and the whirring descends and ascends of tripods, to lead you to an atmosphere ethereal and tactile and you are weary that the dream you conjure up with eyes wide open is about to vanish? How much do we miss out on this world of its blinding beauty and the color of people’s minds? Sven’s art made me visceral about the crushing beauty of everything that he captured on camera, including tragedy.

I watched Cries and Whispers (1973) in an auditorium for a makeshift theatre on top of Ernakulam public library. The rental chairs and the projector were disconcertingly rickety. But that didn’t stop me from being absorbed in the majestic denouement of crimson red on the screen. I was lost. I began to think in color. If soul had color, it had to be a dragon’s red. The tortured, poignant and sometimes wailing relationships were portrayed in color. Though Bergman cleverly sketched the backdrop in fleeting beauty of fall and traditional European set and period, Sven’s art stood out. The last scene where after her funeral Karin read to the audience from her diary about a charmed moment when the three sisters clothed in silken white, strolled about in a sunlit park. They sat beside each other on a swing. Karin reminisced that as a perfect moment of anguish and happiness, and how she cherished its perfection.

Sven made the scene absolutely out of this world. I took the last bus home that night as a believer.

Bergman’s trilogy of faith was another astonishing feat of Sven. Those who watched Winter Light cannot forget the frigid winter in the exterior and interior of pastor Tomas, and the longest close up on Ingrid Thulin as she waded into their soulless existence with her monologue. Who will forget the pointless meanderings of Johann along the hotel’s labyrinthine corridors and the echoes of God’s silence in The Silence? In passion of Anna, Sven deconstructed the colors and eventually the coherence of visuals and senses to portray the emotional isolation of Andreas and his violent resistance to Anna’s efforts to break ice. Sven’s provoking use of deconstructionist contrivances of post modern art and the incredible of implosion of visuals to its photonic sources in the end were unparalleled in their originality and creativity.

Human face was as wide a canvass for as the landscape of Gotland overlooking the Baltic Sea. Persona (1966) was a case in point and a consummation of Bergman’s idea of movie camera as ‘an incredible instrument for recording human soul as captured in the human face’. Despite the open ended plot of the movie, Sven’s camera displays great control and simultaneous sweep of Brechtian alienation techniques, deconstructionist devices and sensitive portrayal of the Nurse and the Patient in a seemingly linear and natural narrative. The movie is one of the post modern marvels.

Fanny and Alexander (1982) was a retreat for Bergman and Sven to the common sources of their shared fascination. The magical world unleashed from the perspective of a child showed an unbridled curiosity to go beyond the limits of memory and perceptivity of adulthood. Child’s amazement at the wonders of everyday discovery, a home theatre which was the playground of dreams, the lantern lit nights in the dormitory where children peeped into the kaleidoscope, the fun and frolic of festive times at the family dinner, the sudden demise of the children’s father marking the end of an era, escapades into the ghostly fantasy world, the defiant confrontation of authority in step father, the terror of growing up, the realization of anguish in wisdom were all taken part while observed through the eyes of a child. Childhood could never be dull. Sven captured the ephemeral world of a child’s life with all its incomprehensibilities, delights, pain and wisdom.

Sacrifice (1986) was Tarkovsky’s final film. In many ways Sven lived the grandeur and abomination of living a camera man’s life during Sacrifice’s shoot. The long shots which were Tarkovsky’s wont, achieved grace in Sven’s camera, even when the Alexander burned down his house as a sacrifice to redeem the world out of nuclear holocaust. That was when the single camera Sven had at his disposal jammed while the house was being charred. And when the rebuilt house was burnt again, midway the blaze, camera had run through an entire reel breaking down the crew into tears. Sven gave Tarkovsky his meditating lens to draw the twilight zone where human kind’s loss of spirituality was acknowledged leading to the repentance and ultimate offer of sacrifice. The wide landscape, Bach’s music, the Japanese flute, Leanordo Davinci’s chiaroscuro painting of the Adoration of the Magi were all pointers to the creative sources of this astonishing and grandiloquently flawed masterpiece made for posterity.

Sven, like Tarkovsky should be known for his spectacular failure as well as many stellar accomplishments which came just as easy.

Ophelia - death by water

One of the most tragic and haunting images from Shakespeare plays that you ever read would be that of Ophelia lying drowned in the still water. She lay in the glassy stream weighed down by the viscous gravity of her tunic, unable to wade through the whirlpool of worldly woes. An image that is so earthy, erotic, deathly and saintly gleaned effortlessly from Gertrude’s soliloquy (from Act 4 Scene 7):

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;

There with fantastic garlands did she come

Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:

There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds

Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook.

Her clothes spread wide;

And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:

Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element: but long it could not be

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death.

She is the alter life of Hamlet and a possibility of the other side of the reluctant nihilist. She died opening her arms and gazing upwards as if she sought redemption for the lives ravaged by revenges. The flowers floating about the stream and leaning on the bank garlanded the shining body of Ophelia. The symbol of death by water has never looked as enchanting anywhere in literature ever.

Water symbolizes the cauldron where human propensities for passion, envy, love, hate and revenge submerge, drown and flow far and wide into a timeless insignificance. Hamlet’s spiritual agony and his quarrel with the ghost of his father (an archetype for mankind’s alter ego and hunger for legacy that go beyond physical death), preponderances on existential values and the eventual gory end inexorably gravitate towards the lyrical and unforgettable image of Ophelia’s death by water.

In the world of Nietzsche, triumphs were nothing but a series of fratricides where Claudius kills his brother, King Hamlet; Hamlet kills his school mates and Ophelia’s brother Laertus. Nietzsche marked the similarities between his Dionysian man and Hamlet as those who have a real glimpse of the essence of things:

“They have understood, and it now disgusts them to act, for their actions can change nothing in the eternal nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that it is expected of them that they should set right a world turned upside down. The knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion.”

“In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being; now he understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia. It disgusts him.”

Nietzsche held out a remedy for this.

“Here the will is in the highest danger. Thus, to be saved, it comes close to the healing magician, art. Art alone can turn those thoughts of disgust at the horror or absurdity of existence into imaginary constructs, which permit living to continue.”

The madness that Hamlet dallied with takes a grandiloquent expression in Ophelia’s death by water. Though she appears only for brief period in the play, the torments and fragility of Ophelia are the perpetual source for art and redemption.


Notes:

The metaphor of Ophelia also provided a psychoanalytical artifact to analyze and represent adolescent girls’ state of mind for right or wrong reasons. Link

T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land which has a well known section titled Death by Water. Nonchalantly it points to the Upanishad-ic references of elemental water carrying death even in the throes of regeneration.

Nietzche Text. Link

A beautiful confusion

There are a few artistes who have this uncanny ability to disarm you of your ever conscious egotistic self. You are instantly drawn right into the whirlpool of their craft while you are not given anytime to conjure up your defenses, intellectual or visceral.

The absurdist and obscurantist among modernist writers though sincere in their efforts, used their craft to communicate their primarily reductionist and nihilist philosophies, albeit with world wars in the background. They managed to drive away vast sections of readers. That was when a few post modern writers and artists unveiled a middle stage where they sought to push the contexts of art to the backdrop and engaged the reader directly.

The result has been a delightful entrée of literature and art bringing in the full force of physical, philosophical and life sciences to the table. Anything that a symbol, alphabet or word can construct are adapted to create a context for the dialogue between the writer (artist) and the reader (viewer). The historical aberrations from painting schools such as Cubism, Surrealism and Dadaism etc where formalists applied their reductionist view of structuralism where considered by these writers to enfranchise the readers by providing resources to catch up or ride past.


The master craftsmen:

Italo Calvino addresses “you” the reader in his book “If on a winters night a traveler...”. He engages you straightaway, cleverly suggests the circumstances in which you picked up this fashionable book to flaunt an image you have given yourself or you’ve just found it from the chaotic township library. What follows is Calvino’s craftsmanship of story telling while revealing a delightful discourse about the semantics of reading, author-reader relationship and deconstruction of social and political dynamics of reading and eventually a realization of what’s important in everyone’s life. The tone of the book is satire.

His experiments took him to write another book titled The Castle of crossed destinies. It is a semiotic fantasy novel where you find the characters attempting to communicate through tarot cards. A narrator is interpreting them since the characters have become mutes due to past traumas. The structure of the book is laid out after crossword puzzles with horizontal and vertical progressions while any given order of the tarot cards defy the patterns you think you understood. The gimmicks Calvino employs go beyond its natural confines.

George Perec is another wonderful writer who messed with structure and content like Calvino. He wrote a fiction titled “A void” that spanned about 300 pages celebrates the banishment of the alphabet “e”. His magnum opus Life: A user’s manual is a visual and conventional literary master class built around the physical and narrative probabilities of written forms. If you read the book you would know that the book is not just clever but a deeper attempt to quantify the history of literary forms and genres while revealing a beguiling charm of whimsical life.


Predecessors:

Luigi Pirandello’s play “Six characters in Search of an Author” was the prototype for all the meta-fictions to come. Borges is another meta-fiction powerhouse who took on and toyed with readers’ comprehension of reality and fiction. He brought forth the concept of collaborative reading and equipped readers to learn the rules of engagement as the act of reading progresses. He adapted all kinds of structural inventions at the time and beyond.


Fellini’s craft:

There is no better practitioner of post-modernism than Federico Fellini. His absolute command of the medium led him to deconstruct the creative and thought processes in making cinema while establishing a parallel channel of communication with the viewer.

His 8½, originally titled as “A beautiful confusion” is a riot where he peels off each layer in the process of movie making while unreservedly displaying the other side of self indulgence and dysfunctional routines of an artiste who at the moment is in a creative crisis after past successes.

Camera is an active member of his films. It hovers right above the shoulder of the protagonist’s (Guido - Marcello Mastroinni) to signify his point of view in no uncertain terms. Guido’s dreams, inspirations, infidelity, fantasies, debauchery, self promotion, vision, confusion and eventual reconciliation to be among his actors/characters for redemption are perhaps just the threadbare view of his art. Fellini is ever aware of viewer’s presence. He unveils not just the ambience of film making but idiosyncrasies and ego of actors, producer and critic.

In the film, Once the French (of course) critic savaged Fellini on his bid on catholic theme as naïve and inadequate attempt to counter the cultural apparatus of Catholicism with childhood memories and unintelligible dreams. Another instance when the critic began his monologue, Guido nodded his crew to hang him.

Fellini like Calvino, Perec, Borges and others wanted share his beautiful confusion with the viewer, no holds barred.

Notes:

Italo Calvino: Italian Writer
George Perec: French Writer
Federico Fellini: Italian director
Links: Metafiction primer , 81/2 Review in Guardian

Kochi Chronicles

N.S. Madhavan had been away from his habitat. He did not write or publish anything for the longest time ever since he won a major literary award for up and coming writers. Then one day he half-heartedly sent a short story from his IAS hideout in Patna with a stamped envelope to M.T.Vasudevan Nair tantalizingly titled Higuita. The rousing reception of this story was legendary. Higuita was the measured metaphor for Father Geevarghese who in order to save Lucy faced the pimp bully Jabbar. He re-enacted the karma of an erstwhile sevens soccer player when he landed goals with an uncanny array of scorpion kicks on Jabber's bleeding snout to the thunderous applause from gallery. Fr. Varghese emulated the famed Colombian soccer player Rene Higuita who broke all conventional coordinates of his position with flair and take the attack to the opponent to etch a spectacular moment in time while bordering on absurd risks.

Readers too woke up to the unprecedented sensibility that Madhavan unleashed. He wrote quite a number of remarkable short stories since then. He was born and spent most of his early life in Kochi. But curiously Kochi never featured in any of his stories. He preserved it for his first fiction.

Madhavan reminisced on the Kochi beneath his times. In it subconsciously he unearthed bits of conversation, faces, friendships, missed schedules and reunions, news of birth and deaths, tapered monsoon rains at night and the rides on bare-boned suburb roads in the city of Kochi. Everything went away in a series of montage and I was slowly beginning to comprehend the pattern of things to come. When you see things this close, judging them would be an utterly wasteful affair.

Reading N.S. Madhavan's "Litanies of Dutch Battery" (in Malayalam: Lanthan Batheriyile Luthiniyakal) leaves you in one such corridor of existence and time. It is a fiction that attempts to weave a short period from the life of Edvina Jessica. She was born and lived as an islander who watched the victories, failures and redemptions of mainland occupants.

Madhavan suggests the make belief constructs of Kochiites history and their idiosyncratic yet disarmingly self-deprecating view of living while sliding in layers of legends, fantasies, myths, facts and images. Latin Catholics in Kochi live by the sea. They derive their biblical identity from carpentry and fishing just like Jesus and Peter were believed to have been doing. Jessica's great grandfather Louis stole the calculus of ship building from a British architect Cornelius Gusler. Her uncle learned the art of making Biriyani from his father who learnt it from a Persian chef from Shiraz. Her neighbor Santiago was on a mission to resurrect the now defunct Christian musical drama known as "Chavittu Natakam" (Tap Dance Musical Drama)1. There are any numbers of keepsakes that sea and wind brought to Kochi.

Native Christians with the advent of Portuguese filled their cultural void by adopting the troubradors songs, European costumes and eastern theatre formats like Kathakali. The long and winding songs were created in pidgin mix of Tamil and Malayalam and orally passed through generations. It carried the ethos of native Christian identity and its ironic disposition of middle age crusades' scrambled history.

Madhavan weaves a shiny yarn of 50s political history of Kerala as it unfurls some of the major events in Kochi - Christian and Nair communities’ struggle for redemption from “regressive” communist government who were in fact democratically elected being the most important. The religious and community leaders organized massive rallies to thwart the education bill intended to disengage the influence of religious institutions on education. The unrest ended with congress party’s federal government dismissing communist state rule. Ironically the communist government in the state is doing a phase II with their current education bill being challenged in the courts all over the country.

Jessica and many others were influenced by Father Vadakkan, padre and influential leader of the struggle and his placement of himself as the true Marxian proponent to counter the ideological warfare. She enacted Father Vadakkan’s fiery speech when she played with her cousins and defecated in the church premise to protest against the punishment meted out to her by the catechism teacher who took exception of her impertinence to question him.

The general deprivation and rebellious nature of Kochiites have had channels to express their self. They have this streak of flaunting their artistic indulgence in music, painting, carpentry, murals, drama, cooking etc. You have the singer Peter inspired by Saigal and his alter ego Mehbub from Mattanchery began Kundan Music club, Santiago egging on the septuagenarians to reinvent Chavittu Nadakam and lament that Communist party lost its innocence that inspired the downtrodden, carpenter Mathaeus cherishing his reputation and sleight of hand in boat building while readapting himself after he was saved from deep sea and taken to Nigeria, Edwin uncle’s measure and feel of recipes, Pushpangadan master’s unrelenting tug at Fermat’s last theorem on prime numbers and then most of all their naïve but endearing acceptance of conflicted identities (Santiago assures Shenoy not to reveal his commie identity while Shenoy himself ruminates on his cultural identity of a south west (Konkan) migrant who is ridiculed and rendered insignificant) and camaraderie would impart a lightness of your being in Kochi and more so at Lanthan Batheri.

There is an interesting school of art in Kochi, called Orthic. The word is derived from the Malayalam equivalent for memory, Orma and glass as the medium to paint. Consequently the artist has to paint in reverse since it’s going to be the reflection of the image he conjured up in his mind. This recollection of artist’s Orma and his stand point on the other side of viewers is unique and reveals a mirthful flamboyance. Jessica remains a non-intrusive observer and let the awareness come to her and reflects back to the reader when it does. Her litanies2 for the necessities of the island and redemption from minor calamities have been chronicled with a microcosmic vision of life and times in Kochi.

The mosaic Madhavan created when he inversed Jessica’s itsy bitsy memories through a glass has been a joy. I have traveled the places he narrated. I have studied in the school where Raghavan and Pushpangadan master taught in the book, I have watched the orange sunsets beyond the slender strip of Vypin behind Lanthan Batheri and I think I have met all the characters in person if I let go on this anachronistic time, really!


Notes:
1. Chavittu Natakam featured a native reproduction of western European legends of romanticized crusades with peculiar tamil-malayalam equivalent names for characters. The most important drama was known to be “Karalmann Charitham” (Karalmann’s legends) which was nothing but a collage of history and fantasy where Charlemagne’s Basque opponents were replaced by Muslims and his crusades to win the love of his lady. Troubadors created these romanticized legends with historical aberrations to fill in religious undertones where possible.

2. Litanies: A litany is a well-known and much appreciated form of responsive petition, used in public liturgical services, and in private devotions, for common necessities of the Church, or in calamities — to implore god's aid or to appease His just wrath. (from catholic encyclopedia)

Listening to Salilda

Salilda descended along the shores of Kerala when Chemmeen (The wrath of the sea, literally The shrimp) was released in 1965. The heart rending ditties in the movie caught the imagination of an entire generation and many that followed. Ramu Kariat took quite a risk bringing Salilda over, however I guess the shared love for music, spirit of Spartan life and ackowledgement of genius brought them close. The songs from Chemmeen is now an acquired heritage of keralites.

That was when a few of us realized that there was more to him that met the eyes and ears. His music spoke more than just the notes. It pervaded the artist's state of mind and the process of creativity in the most effortless of means while looking to sublimate awareness of lives around oneself. That was when we learnt about his father who whacked the white colonialist when the latter addressed him "dirty nigger", the large collection of western classical music and folk songs gathered from Bengal and Assam, we learnt further how IPTA (Indian People's Theatre Association) and Indian communist party provided the right backdrop for an evolving artist, harmonizing the wave of turmoil Bengal and the rest of the nation was going through with his songs of social consciousness and awakening and the last phase that began when Salilda traveled to Bombay to remake his story Rikshawalla in Hindi (Do Bigha Zameen). His work in Madhumati was the high point in popularity.

However a lot of us were attracted to his creativity and the traits of possibly the last of renaissance men from Bengal. Aravindan invited da to compose music for his final film Vaasthuhaara, another non-descript director had a call from olden days to invite Da which was to be Da's final film as well. Besides late eighties and early nineties had a lot of meaningful television films and serials blessed with his title and background scores. You may recall the title and background music for Darpan, Alag, Charitraheen and a few others. Long after the half hour magic was over, the music lingered and it still does. Who would agree now that television could be that good!

Salilda's music has a haunting quality. It opens up an ethereal vision painted with elusive colors gleaned from a dying twilight and all that was good from Victorian and Tagore era. The prelude of his songs engulfs your being momentarily and the poetry is given a chance to catch up the lofty skies of imagination and then the interludes build a bridge between vision and memory. More often than not you recognize the musical notes transcending the mortality of lyrics and elevate aficionados to another plane.

Sometimes his music stood out to the discomfort of lesser artists who happened to be the directors and writers. We don't have too many outstanding musical films from Salilda because there were not too many to exploit his core genius. Instead it appears that he was given a free hand to fill the gaps with compositions that were apparently not really appropriate or relevant. His music rendered every other expression redundant: the longings of a lover, dance of monsoon rains, grief of a Vasthuhaara (dispossessed), introspecting on life and renunciation, freedom of a Baul singer on a distant country road, riding boat on a bending river...

His legacy is golden treasure of images drawn in musical notes.