Revisiting the Calcutta Writers Workshop

I remember finding volumes printed by the Calcutta Writers Workshop while browsing the library as a young graduate student, but at the time I didn't have much context or understanding of the history of the group or its philosophy. Indeed, at that time I found the books to be kind of shoddy -- the hand-printed aspect of the volumes made them seem archaic.

More recently, as I've been researching "modernism" in India and Pakistan, I've been learning more, and I now have a much greater appreciation of what P. Lal and company were trying to do. First, a little background: Calcutta Writers Workshop was founded in 1958 by a group of seven writers -- mainly as a venue to share poetry. By 1960, the group had begun publishing chapbooks of poetry and small books of criticism; they also started a journal called Miscellany. The group is still active as a publishing house, with recent volumes listed on its website here.

I would also recommend readers check out P. Lal's essay on the founding of the Writers Workshop here. And see the profile of P. Lal in The Hindu, from last year.


Mir Baqi and the Babri Mosque: Some Historical Footnotes

Many of us who follow the issue of communalism in India have found ourselves somewhat vexed by the recent verdict by the Allahabad high court regarding the disputed Mosque at Ayodhya. I won't review the basic facts of the case: see Wikipedia for starters. With regards to opinions on the verdict, Siddharth Varadarajan's perspective in The Hindu seems pretty compelling to me. I do not think this is a very good opinion based on the merits of the case as I understand them (though it may be a good practical decision for the short run).

Instead of injecting more opinion, I thought I would add some material that may not be that readily accessible to readers regarding the archeological evidence. As is widely known, the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya (or Babri Masjid as it is generally known in India) is thought to have been built in 1528 by a general of the Mughal Emperor Babur, Mir Baqi. There are a number of historical and archeological questions at issue, but two of the most important ones I have been wondering about are:

1) Is there any evidence that there was a Hindu temple, or a Ram temple, at the site before the Mosque was built? If so, is there any evidence that that structure was in fact destroyed in order to build the Mosque? On the second part of this question, the Allahabad court did not accept any evidence that any previous structure was destroyed. But the first part of the question leads to a number of complex issues, which we'll discuss further below.

2) How clear is it that the Mosque was in fact built by Mir Baqi in 1528, given that Babur does not mention any Mosque at Ayodhya in the Babur-Nama, otherwise a very reliable and detailed historical chronicle of Babur's reign? Again, my historical sources lead in conflicting directions on this issue. The main evidence for the date and the builder come from an inscription left by Mir Baqi specifying the date and builder, discovered by Annette Beveridge, who produced the first English translation of the Babur-Nama. But some historians doubt the veracity of this inscription.


Translation Workshop: Prabhjot Kaur's "Bewildered" (UPDATED)

My first attempt a couple of months ago at translating from Punjabi was humbling, but I'm back to give it another shot. As readers may remember, with help from a couple of friends, I put forth an attempt at a translation in the earlier post, only to find that Jasdeep of Parchanve did a much better job of it in the comments.

I'm still looking at the same anthology of Experimental Punjabi Poetry from 1962 (Prayogashil Punjabi Kavita), though this time I'm looking at a poem by Prabhjot Kaur, "Pashemaan Haan," or "Bewildered." This time, with humility in mind, I'll just translate the first three verses today, and put out a call for help from our friend in Chandigarh (Jasdeep) as well as anyone else who might wish to help. The poem is on the theme of corruption....


Why I don't like Mulk Raj Anand's "Untouchable" (and a few examples of novels dealing intelligently with caste)

When asked to suggest a novel that describes the caste system in India, the first one that comes to mind for many people, especially outside of India, is Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable. But turning to that novel always feels like a cop-out to me, and I wish it weren't quite so 'canonical' as it is. It's not simply that Anand isn't himself from an 'untouchable' caste (or as we would say now, a Dalit) -- in fact, most well-known Indian writers who have addressed caste in their works have come from upper caste backgrounds. The problem with Untouchable is that it doesn't really come close to being convincing in its attempt to approximate the perspective of Bakha. A passage that is a case in point might be the following:

The blood in Bakha's veins tingled with the heat as he stood before it. His dark face, round and solid and exquisitely well defined, lit with a queer sort of beauty. The toil of the body had built up for him a very fine physique. It seemed to suit him,to give a homogeneity, a wonderful wholeness to his body, so that you could turn round and say: 'Here is a man.' And it seemed to give him a nobility, strangely in contrast with his filthy profession and with the sub-human status to which he was condemned from birth.


The strength of this passage might be in Anand's interest in depicting the physicality of Bakha's body -- he was clearly reading modernists like Joyce and Lawrence as he was writing, and the novel is strongly marked by that. But the weaknesses are also evident, starting with phrases like "a queer sort of beauty," which is effectively a kind of exoticism (purely exteriorized), rather than an observed description. Another phrase that troubles me is "a wonderful wholeness to his body," which sounds like Lawrence or maybe Hardy -- and again, it's an ideological descriptor; what it says is hard work makes Bakha beautiful. Anand does not really show us here anything that is particular or unique about Bakha himself, as an individuated character.

And this kind of problem recurs throughout the book. Bakha's actual caste is never named; he is simply described as an "untouchable." The book, in the end, works better as a work of Gandhian agit-prop by proxy than it does as a novel.

There are actually much better novels that deal with caste issues in one way or another. I mentioned Godaan in some recent blog posts -- and that might be one place to start. Another book that comes to mind for me is Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, which is a really closely observed look at the experience of a group of characters from the Chamaar caste in Bombay after independence. And yet another novel that comes to mind might be The God of Small Things, though Roy's novel is so over-loaded with themes (including also incest, the separation anxiety of twins Estha and Rahel, the Communist party, etc.) that it's sometimes hard to say what the novel is primarily about.

One book dealing with caste I would unreservedly recommend is U.R. Anantha Murthy's novel, Samskara. This is a novel published in 1965, originally in the Kannada language. It was translated into English in 1978, and is pretty widely available in the west (it's currently still in print at Amazon). The power of Anantha Murthy's novel lies in its close attention to the specifics of Brahminic rituals, and the sometimes convoluted logic of 'pollution' in a village Brahmin society. The limitation, perhaps, is that Samskara is so narrowly focused on Brahmins; the other caste groups are present as potential threats (or objects of desire).

Finally, when I raised a question on Twitter ("what are your favorite novels dealing with caste?"), Jasdeep of the Punjabi translation blog Parchanve had this answer: "Anne ghorhe da daan by gurdiaal singh(novel), Kutti vehda by maninder singh, Kaang (punjabi short story)". I must admit I've read none of these, though I've heard others (specifically, Prof. Rana Nayar Punjab University) speak quite highly of Gurdial Singh -- stay tuned.

Gordon Roadarmel and Modern Hindi Literature

One of the key critics in looking at modernism in Hindi literature in particular is the American critic and translator, Gordon Roadarmel. Today Roadarmel is probably better known as a translator (i.e., of Godaan) than as a critic, mainly because we have several excellent published translations from him, while his 1969 dissertation from UC-Berkeley was never formally published. (In terms of translations, Roadarmel also did a collection of stories called "A Death in Delhi," and a translation of Agyeya's novel Apne Apne Anjani [To Each His Stranger].) The fact that such seminal research went unpublished is hard for me to fathom, though it may be that the critic's premature death in 1971 may have had more than a little to do with it.

Luckily, I was able to track down a copy of Roadarmel's dissertation in bound form at Penn, and have been reading it this week. Here I wanted to offer a few helpful quotes from him as regards the 'modernist' (or experimental) turn in modern Hindi fiction, which is sometimes described as the "Nayi Kahani" (or New Story).

Here is Roadarmel's account of the emergence of that movement in the late 1950s:

[T]he popularity of the [short] story seems to have been first noted in print by a writer calling himself Chakradhar, in the April 1954 issue of Kalpana an important literary journal. He says: "After a long time, short stories have again begun to attract readers." A change in the nature of the stories was noted by the son of Premchand, Shripat Ray, writing in the New Year issue of Kahani in 1956:

I began to wonder whether I might be behind the pace of the times and therefore was not noting the progress in the Hindi story which ought to be expected... The form of the story was changing and perhaps I, because of my old traditions, was asking of the story what today was not characteristic of it.

The naming of the new group is credited to Namwar Singh, probably in an article published in Kahani just a year after Shripat's comments. Namwar wrote: 'In thinking about the story today, the first thing that comes to my mind is the question as to whether, like 'nayi kavita,' there is also such a thing as 'nayi kahani.'

In 1957 the term Nayi Kahani became generally applied to the new writing, though debate has never stopped as to the appropriateness of the term. By 1957, Hindi literary circles generally had hailed the material appearing in that issue of Kahani early in 1956. A year before, in 1955, eighty percent of the stories in the special issue of the periodical were by older writers. In this 1956 issue, eighty percent were by the newer writers; and "in the Hindi world there was such wide discussion of this issue and such a warm welcome that the foundation of the revival of the story was established."


In subsequent pages, Roadarmel goes on to talk about the initial divergence in the Nayi Kahani movement between authors who were more interested in 'rural' fiction and those who were more thematically 'urban'. One text mentioned as aligned with the rural-ist Nahi Kahani is Phanishwer Nath Renu's 1954 Maili Anchal (The Soiled Border). But this debate died down relatively quickly, and over time, the urban sensibility came to predominate.

Thoughts on Premchand's "Godaan"

The first surprise in reading Premchand's 1936 masterpiece Godaan is just how different it is from the blurb describing it. Here, for instance, is the standard blurb, lifted in this case from Wikipedia:

The protagonist, Hori, a poor peasant, desperately longs for a cow, a symbol of wealth and prestige in rural India. In a Faustian twist of fate, Hori gets his cow, but pays for it with his life. After his death, the village priests demand a cow from his widow to bring his soul absolution, and peace (Godaan). The narrative represents the average Indian farmer's existence under colonial rule, with the protagonist facing cultural and feudal exploitation.


It's hard to imagine anyone having the patience to read a 400 novel on a subject as limited as this, but fortunately the novel itself is much more than a single villager's cow-related struggles. There are several parallel plots: the story of Hori and his wife, Dhaniya, mentioned above; the story of Hori's son Gobar, and his wife, Jhuniya, who leave the farm in rural UP for an urban life in nearby Lucknow; and the story of the Rai Sahib and his friends in Lucknow. The Rai Sahib owns the land on which the village is situated, and as the novel develops his circle of friends, including especially a philosophy professor named Doctor Mehta, an English-educated single woman named Miss Malti, and the sugar mill director Mr Chandra Prakash Khanna, all become major characters with their own personal and familial plots. Even in the village, new plots begin to spin out involving characters who seem minor at first, but who begin to play more important roles as the story develops.

The novel is in short, a big story in the manner of the grand Victorian novels, with about fifteen major characters. The two nodal points are Hori, the poor villager (whose life really isn't that oriented to the idea of the "gift of a cow"), and Rai Sahib, the powerful Zamindar in Lucknow. In the plot of the novel the two characters are shown meeting once, at the beginning, but from that point onwards their stories go in different directions (though certain incidents, do keep the two characters in each others' orbit).

Another misconception about Godaan comes with its form -- namely, "social realism" -- which might lead one to expect this to be mainly a political novel, with the Zamindar and his high-caste agents as villains, while the poor Kayastha (Kshatriya) and Chamar villagers are heroes. In actuality, Premchand gives full and equal psychological depth to both the high-born urban characters and the poor villagers, and the novel's politics are much more subdued than one might expect from a key figure in the Progressive Writers' movement, writing at the height of the era of anti-colonial agitation. This is undeniably a novel that dramatizes the crisis of rural poverty and the corruption of the ruling class, but what comes across more than the socio-political critique is Premchand's remarkable characterization and plot.


Scattered Thoughts and Readings: Moorish Spain

We recently did a quick jaunt through southern Spain, piggybacked on a business trip my wife had to do in Madrid. The places we visited, Granada, Sevilla (Seville), Gibraltar, and Toledo, were sites had long wanted to visit, and I was not disappointed. (I also wanted to get to Cordoba -- a city whose name has much been in the news of late, because of the Park51 Mosque/Community center controversy -- though on this trip we ended up not having time.)

At the Al-Hambra, I was surprised to find that the English-language self-guided audio tour consists almost entirely of quotes from a book the American writer Washington Irving published in 1832: Tales of the AlHambra (Wikipedia; Full text). The historian Richard Fletcher, in his book Moorish Spain, laments how Irving and a British contemporary, Richard Ford (author of Handbook for Travellers in Spain, 1845), helped through his account to shape a 'romanticized' vision of Moorish Spain in the English-speaking world -- an account that uses a kind of positive or approving Orientalism to invoke a palace life full of intrigues, impossible grandiosity, and mystery. Here's an excerpt from Irving's book, which is also included in the section of the self-guided Audio Tour of the Al-Hambra I listened to:

Muley Abul Hassan, in his youthful days, had married his cousin, the princess Ayxa la Horra, daughter of his uncle, the ill-starred sultan, Muhamed the Left-handed; by her he had two sons, the eldest of whom was Boabdil, heir presumptive to the throne. Unfortunately at an advanced age he took another wife, Isabella de Solis, a young and beautiful Christian captive; better known by her Moorish appellation of Zoraya; by her he had also two sons. Two factions were produced in the palace by the rivalry of the sultanas, who were each anxious to secure for their children the succession to the throne. Zoraya was supported by the vizier Abul Cacim Venegas, his brother Reduan Venegas, and their numerous connections, partly through sympathy with her as being, like themselves, of Christian lineage, and partly because they saw she was the favorite of the doting monarch.

The Abencerrages, on the contrary, rallied round the sultana Ayxa; partly through hereditary opposition to the family of Venegas, but chiefly, no doubt, through a strong feeling of loyalty to her as daughter of Muhamed Alhayzari, the ancient benefactor of their line.

The dissensions of the palace went on increasing. Intrigues of all kinds took place, as is usual in royal palaces. Suspicions were artfully instilled in the mind of Muley Abul Hassan that Ayxa was engaged in a plot to depose him and put her son Boabdil on the throne. In his first transports of rage he confined them both in the Tower of Comares, threatening the life of Boabdil. At dead of night the anxious mother lowered her son from a window of the tower by the scarfs of herself and her female attendants; and some of her adherents, who were in waiting with swift horses, bore him away to the Alpuxarras. It is this imprisonment of the sultana Ayxa which possibly gave rise to the fable of the queen of Boabdil being confined by him in a tower to be tried for her life. No other shadow of a ground exists for it, and here we find the tyrant jailer was his father, and the captive sultana, his mother.

The massacre of the Abencerrages in the halls of the Alhambra, is placed by some about this time, and attributed also to Muley Abul Hassan, on suspicion of their being concerned in the conspiracy.


For better or for worse, the government of Spain continues to encourage Irving's image of Granada and the Al-Hambra for Anglophone tourists to this day. (I am curious to know whether the Spanish-language personal audio tours also use Washington Irving's book as a primary source. While I was there it didn't occur to me to ask.)

Five Types of Hybridity: Steve Yao in Wasafiri

A little while ago I did a long post on the concept of 'hybridity', hoping to provide a resource useful for people who teach on this topic the classroom (along the lines of my earlier "Introduction to Edward Said & Orientalism"). My intention was to simplify a complex concept in postcolonial theory for a general readership, but I don't think I entirely succeeded -- since the essay I wrote raised three new problems for each conceptual problem it addressed.

Cultural hybridity is simply quite difficult to define, in part because it's a metaphor from biology, and we have to remember that metaphors can fit literary or cultural artifacts well or poorly. Hybridity can also be hard to pin down in part because it's become so widespread (if one takes a look at contemporary American popular music, for example, it's hard to find very much that isn't in some way hybridizing hip hop culture with the conventions of mainstream pop.).

One essay I came across recently, "Towards a Taxonomy of Hybridity" by Steve Yao (Wasafiri, 2003), seems to suggest that it might actually be helpful to embrace, rather than shy away from, the biologism in the idea of hybridity. I cannot post the whole essay for copyright reasons, and unfortunately it is not online as far as I can tell (if readers would like a copy, send me an email and I will send it to you). Here is how Yao sets up his "taxonomy" of hybridity:

Closer consideration of'hybridity's' biologistic foundations can help to delineate a more refined critical 'taxonomy'. As Robert J C Young has usefully pointed out, the English word 'hybrid' stems from the Latin term hybrida, meaning 'the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar', or more generally according to another source, an 'animal whose parents belong to different varieties or to different species'.' Hence the word also meant a 'person whose parents belong to different ethnic groups, probably of non Indo-European origin'. Going back even further, a commonly held etymology relates the term 'hybrid' to the Greek word hubris, or the quality of overweening pride most closely associated with the heroes of classical tragedy. More specifically, hubris implies a going beyond one's proper station, as in presuming to the status of a god or committing rape. Based on its historical development, then, the term 'hybridity' carries with it a sense of sexual, and implicitly violent, transgression of 'natural' categories that produces a new entity with a complex and multiply determined lineage. Hence the notion entails a necessarily biologistic conception of (reproductive interaction between categorically separated 'types'. This inherent biologism finds its clearest expression, moreover, in the strictest current botanical sense of'hybridity', which designates the union of genetic material from parents of two different genotypes that results in the simultaneous expression of traits from both within a single organism. Transposing this idea of generative fusion to the domain of culture implies mutually constitutive and reinforcing signification between different cultures and traditions.

[...] I propose a new 'taxonomy' of hybridisation that explicitly acknowledges and builds upon 'hybridity's' biologistic foundations. Differentiating among various techniques for combining cultural traditions and/or linguistic systems, this taxonomy includes the following categories: 'cross-fertilisation', 'mimicry', 'grafting', 'transplantation', and 'mutation'.'


In subsequent pages, Yao goes on to show that Marilyn Chen's polyglot poetry (she inserts Chinese characters in her English-language poems, and plays on complex etymologies of Mandarin words in English verses) might be seen as "cross-fertilization": "At this moment in the lyric the Chinese language shapes the poetic articulation of English, thereby constituting an instance of productive cultural interaction."

[Examples of Marilyn Chen's poetry -- though without any Mandarin characters -- can be found here.]

Another example of "cross-fertilization" that comes to mind might be Agha Shahid Ali's attempt to encourage the use of the Ghazal form in English, which I talked about here.

Translating from the Punjabi -- K.S. Duggal

I have been looking at an obscure volume of Punjabi poetry published in 1962, as part of a project I'm doing on South Asian progressive and modernist writing. The volume, Prayogashil Punjabi Kavita ("Experimental Punjabi Poetry," edited by Jasbir Singh Ahluwalia), has never been translated as far as I can tell.

One poem I've found particularly challenging, owing in part to the vocabulary, is by Kartar Singh Duggal. Duggal is a writer whose short stories I know well & have worked on over the years; this is the first time I've seen any of his poetry. Below are three renditions of the poem, the Gurmukhi/Punjabi, the Roman Punjabi, and finally an attempt at an English version. In some cases I had trouble getting Google's "Transliterate/Punjabi" site to render certain Gurmukhi letters, so I left those words in Roman.

Incidentally, I don't necessarily know that I love the message of this poem yet; I'm more interested in the kinds of ideas and the style of the poetry from this period.


ਫਿਰ ਆਈ ਹੈ

ਫਿਰ ਆਈ ਹੈ
ਮੁਸ ਮੁਸ ਕਰਦੀ ਹੋਈ
ਲਿਬੜੀ ਹੋਈ ਵਿਸ਼ ਨਾਲ
ਕੱਜੀ ਹੋਈ, ਢਕੀ ਹੋਈ

ਫਿਰ ਆਈ ਹੇਇ,
ਚਘ੍ਲੀ ਹੋਈ, ਚਟੀ ਹੋਈ
ਕੁਤਰੀ ਹੋਈ, ਛਿਜੀ ਹੋਈ
ਗੰਢੀ ਹੋਈ, ਤ੍ਰਪੀ ਹੋਈ.

ਫਿਰ ਈ ਹੈ
ਫੁਲਿਆ ਹੋਇਆ ਅੰਗ ਅੰਗ,
ਸੁਜ਼ਿਆ ਹੋਇਆ ਬੰਦ ਬੰਦ,
ਅਕ੍ਰੀ ਹੋਈ, ainthee ਹੋਈ

ਫਿਰ ਆਈ ਹੈ
ਪੂਰੇ ਦਿਨਾ ਦੇ ਨੇਰੇ,
ਆਲਸੀ ਹੋਈ, ਹਫੀ ਹੋਈ
ਢਾਹਿ ਢਾਹਿ ਪੈਂਦੀ ਪਈ

ਫਿਰ ਆਈ ਹੈ,
ਝਗ ਝਗ ਬੁਲੀਆ ਤੇ,
ਮੈਲ ਮੈਲ ਦੰਡੋ-ਦੰਡ,
ਕੂੜ ਦੀ ਪੰਡ ਨਿਰੀ.
ਫਿਰ ਈ ਹੈ ਫਾਈਲ
ਹਾਜਾਈ ਔਰਤ ਦੀ ਤਰਾ.




Phir Aaee Hai (written in 1962)
by Kartar Singh Duggal

phir aaee hai
mus mus karde hoee
libRee hoe vish naal
kajee hoee, DHakee hoee.

phir aaee hai,
chaghlee hoee, chaTee hoee
kutree hoee, chhajee hoee
gandhee hoee, trappee (?) hoee

phir aaee haie,
phuliaa hoyaa ang ang,
sujiaa hoeaa band band,
akRee hoee, ainTHee hoee

phir aaee hai,
pure dina de neRe
alsaaee hoee, haphee hoee
dhahi dhahi paindee pei

phir aaee hai,
jhag jhag buleeaa te,
mail mail dando-dand,
kooR dee panD niree
phir aaee hai phaaeel
harjaaee aurat dee taraa




Still She Comes

[UPDATE: I decided to remove my own attempt at a translation, as Jasdeep, in the comments put forward a much better rendering of the poem, which I'm now copying and pasting.]

again, she has come
smiling coyly
doused in venom
veiled, concealed


again, she has come
disgraced, decrepit
clipped , smacked
sewn, stitched

again, she has come
puffed up body
swollen limbs
numbed, stiffened

again, she has come
in the last days
slumberous, exhausted
collapsing

again, she has come
frothing mouth
begrimed teeth
like a pile of trash
agin, the file has come
like a fallen woman



Assuming that the meaning as rendered above is roughly correct, what is this poem actually about? What is Duggal's "message"?

How to Gender a Hawk ("Shikkra"): a look at a Shiv Kumar Batalvi poem

I came across a link to the Punjabi poet Shiv Kumar Batalvi on YouTube earlier today, in the course of doing some research for an encyclopedia entry I'm working on. It's Shiv Kumar himself, probably sometime in the early 1970s. Shiv Kumar in person is every bit as magnetic and mannered as you might expect.



After I shared the link on Twitter, Sepoy of Chapati Mystery sent me a link to a Shiv Kumar poem he liked, which then led me to yet another Shiv Kumar poem here, as sung by Jagjit Singh:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-I2UiLbczQ

Here it is in transliterated Punjabi (forgive any errors; I'm doing this partly by ear):

Maye ni Main ik shikkra yaar banaya
Ohde sir te kalgi
Te perin jhanjar
Oh chogg chuginda aayea
Ik oh de roop di dhoop thikeree
Oh duja mekhan tirhaya
Teeja oh da rang gulabi
oh kise gori maa da jaaya

Ishq da ik palang navare
be aisa chandni vichdaya
dhan di chatt ho gai maili
us pair chappal ke paaya

Dukhan mere Naina De Koye,
Te vich Harh Hanjua Da Aya,
Sari Raat Gayi vich Socha,
Us Aye Ki zulm Kamaya,
Subha Savere Layni Vatna,
We Asa Mal Mal os Navaya,
Dehi De vich Niklan Chinga,
Ni Sada Haath Gaya Kumlaya,
Churi Kuta Ta O Khanda Nahi,
Weh Asa Dil Da Maas Khawaya,
Ek Udari Aisi Mari, -2
O Mud Vatni Na Aya,
O Maye Nee, Main Ek Shikra Yaar Banaya


And here is how one person translated the poem in English:

Mother! Mother!
I befriended a hawk.
A plume on his head
Bells on his feet,
He came pecking for grain.
I was enamored!

His beauty
Was sharp as sunlight.
He was thirsty for perfumes.
His color was the color of a rose,
The son of a fair mother.
I was enamored!

His eyes,
Were an evening in springtime.
His hair, a dark cloud.
His lips,
A rising autumn dawn.
I was enamored!

His breath
Was filled with flowers,
Like a sandalwood garden.
Spring danced thru his body
So bathed was it in fragrances.
I was enamored!.

In his words
Blew the eastern breeze,
Like the sound of a blackbird.
His smile was the whiteness of a crane in the rice fields,
Taking flight at the clap of a hand.
I was enamored!.

I laid
A bed of love
In the moonlight.
My body-sheet was stained
The instant he laid his foot on my bed.
I was enamored!

The corners of my eyes,
Hurt.
A flood of tears engulfed me.
All night long I tried to fathom
How he did this to me.
I was enamored!

Early in the morning
I scrubbed and bathed my body
With vaTana.
But embers kept bursting out,
And my hands flagged.
I was enamored!

I crushed choori,
He would not eat it.
So I fed him the flesh of my heart.
He took flight, such a flight did he take,
That he never returned.
I was enamored!

Mother! Mother!
I befriended a hawk.
A plume on his head
Bells on his feet,
He came pecking for grain.
I was enamored!


What struck me at first, reading that, was the surprise at what seemed to be a celebration of male beauty. His beauty, his eyes, his body... um, is there something about Shiv Kumar we should know?

Another interesting thought from my wife, who noticed that "Jhanjar" would be the anklets that might be worn by a woman, while a "kalgi" would generally be an adornment for a man (as in, ornamentation on a turban). The fact that these two images are juxtaposed does seem to support the idea of a kind of ambiguously gendered love-object.

Actually, the gendering of the word "hawk" ("shikkra") is male in Punjabi, but it's probably a mistake to read too much into that accident. The literary critic Manjit Singh, in "Glimpses of Punjabi Poetry," suggests that the inspiration for the poem (one of Shiv Kumar's earlier works) was a woman who betrayed him:

Another source of inspiration for his poetry was Anushia, who came in his life and promised him life-long companionship. Now Shiv felt somewhat comforted but when she left for abroad without any intimation, he could not bear the loss a second time and sent messages to her to return but she did not come. Shiv likened here to the bird 'Shikkra'... (Manjit Singh, "Glimpses of Modern Punjabi Literature", 1994)


Ok, so maybe this poem isn't what the English translation might make it seem like it is. It's still interesting to me that he chose a metaphor that is so strongly masculine for this poem of longing, loss, and betrayal.

Incidentally, if anyone reading this wants to correct either the transliteration or the translation (which is not my own), I'd be grateful.

An Essay by me at Open Letters Monthly

I have an essay in the August 2010 edition of Open Letters Monthly. It's on film adaptations, and meant for a general audience:

The Original wasn't Better

Here is an excerpt from near the beginning of the essay:

From the perspective of readers and critics, the question on the table is how serious readers can come to peace with Hollywood adaptations of classic works of literature. (There is also, of course, a growing body of non-western adaptations of canonical western literature, including a pair of highly recommended recent Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare, Maqbool/Macbeth, and Omkara/Othello—but that’s a subject that deserves its own essay.)

Here, I want to suggest that while readers are right to be wary of specifically Hollywood film adaptations of classic British and American literature, there are in fact times when the old truism that the “original was better” turns out not to be true.



I would love to hear some feedback from readers, either in comments here or at the OLM website.

The Demands of Honesty: on Amitava Kumar's "Nobody Does the Right Thing"

"Write what you know" is one of those creative writing class truisms that actually happens to be true, if our goal is to tell a realistic story about a society at a given moment in time. Writers want people to believe that the kinds of fictional lives they're asking them to live with and care about for a few hours, as they read, are actually plausible. Chances are, what makes a story seem plausible is the fact that it is based, even if only partially, on the truth.

But "write what you know" is also much, much harder than it might seem. At times, it can even feel like a chain around your neck -- though that doesn't mean you can just walk away from it. In his new novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing, Amitava Kumar acknowledges the problem directly in what might be my favorite line of the book: "If you could tell just any story you wanted, no demands ever needed to be made on your honesty." [Another favorite line: "Bihari society was conservative; it was also corrupt, hollow to its core; you put a finger on its thin, distended skin and it split under your touch, revealing white worms"]

For Amitava Kumar, who was born and raised in Patna, in the Indian state of Bihar, it's Bihar that encapsulates the memories and history that are what the author "knows," and what he returns to (always slightly differently), in book after book. "Honesty" and "Bihar" live in the same site for Amitava, and yet the content of that Honesty -- the Truth one seeks to represent -- remains stubbornly elusive. Kumar's recently-published novel Nobody Does the Right Thing, which was first published as Home Products in India in 2007, continues to develop this theme. It's a terrific novel, which I think will be challenging to many readers in the Indian subcontinent as well as the West, but many of the elements that make it challenging are also what make it great.

For the new Duke University Press edition of his novel, Amitava has produced a new edit of the book, and provided a little character guide to orient the reader, though he doesn't give a glossary, italicize Hindi words, or back away from naming concrete aspects of the material world: specific towns and regions all over northern India, the names of prominent politicians or common points of historical reference, and so on. In one sense, Amitava's novel might be seen as a translation of life in the Hindi belt to the medium of the English language, but it's a translation that leaves a certain level of opacity intact. (Still, it's not hard to put two and two together if you're willing to try. Look it up, baby.)

Readers may already have somewhat of a sense of who Amitava Kumar is, but I thought it might be helpful to briefly proffer my own re-introduction, as a long-time reader of Amitava's works.

Amitava Kumar has published close to a dozen books in a relatively short span of time, and is one of the most accomplished South Asian diaspora literary critics and journalists working today. I started hearing his name spoken of in awed tones by fellow-graduate students around 2000, the year he published Passport Photos, a breakthrough work that combined cultural criticism of the South Asian diaspora with literary theory, scraps of the author's own poetry, political interventions, and autobiography. I also heard good things about his documentary about the Indian community in Trinidad, Pure Chutney (1998), though I didn't end up seeing it until this summer. Another highly recommended early book is Bombay, London, New York (2002), which continues the trajectory set out by Passport Photos. There is a good deal we could say about these earlier books (as well as important collections and anthologies published more recently, such as World Bank Literature, and Away: the Indian Writer as Expatriate), but for now it might be sufficient to simply suggest that the 'collage' style of Kumar's writing, the diverse range of subjects he considers, and the emphasis on immediacy and first-person involvement, ought to make his writing appealing to people who read blogs like this one. Kumar's writing style was already somewhat "bloggy" even before the word "weblog" was coined.

As I understand it, Amitava was at work on this novel as early as 2004-2005, and published a longer version of Nobody Does the Right Thing in 2007 as Home Products -- only in the Indian market. Amitava shopped around amongst U.S. publishers looking for a home, but only succeeded in finding one this year, with Duke University Press. His essay on what it was like to write the novel, "How to Write a Novel," from conception to completion, might be inspiring to anyone who has had aspirations of publishing a novel themselves:


Amitava has also published a non-fiction work with Duke University Press this summer, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, which has been aptly reviewed by the website The Complete Review:


Also, see an excerpt from an early chapter, relating to the American government's case against Hemant Lekhani, at Guernica magazine.


This is an important book in its own right -- a must read for anyone who has had doubts about the "War on Terror," as prosecuted either by the Governments of India or the United States. I won't be reviewing that book here, however. (I may review it sometime soon.)

* * *

The Novel Itself:

Nobody Does the Right Thing is a story about a young journalist named Binod Singh, who sets out, on the encouragement of a movie-producer, to write a screenplay based on a true event that he hoped would make him famous. The story at issue relates to a teenage girl named Mala Srivastava who had had an affair with a Patna politician, only to be mysteriously murdered. After Binod published the article in an English-language, Bombay-based daily newspaper about the murdered young woman, he gets a call from a movie producer, who wants him to turn it into a film script. But he finds writing that script much more difficult than he would have expected; among other things, her family are extremely suspicious of him and uncooperative. Binod turns to his own family-members, who are themselves bit-players in Bihari politics, for help, but finds himself growing increasingly involved in his family's story (which has its own bodies buried in various places), rather than the girl's. Over time, his subject seems to shift, and he grows increasingly aware that keeping his finger on the "truth" of the matter is a challenging proposition. Finally, he has to decide whether he wants to stay committed to finding and recording the truth and remain somewhat marginal, or take a much easier path to success through the preparation of fanciful melodramas, for which there is always a ready audience in the Indian media-sphere.

Earlier I stated that I see this novel as an attempt at a "translation of life in the Hindi belt to the medium of the English language"; this is not a trivial part of what Amitava is up to here. This is a novel that pays quite close attention to the intricacies of language -- the different registers of Hindi. It comes up again and again with Binod:

When he had come out of university, he wrote in both Hindi and English. He used to file all news reports in English, but his more reflective essays on Sunday were for the siter paper in Hindi. These essays were filled with nostalgia and protest, and reflected perhaps the loneliness he had felt while living away from home in Delhi.

[...] The essays appeared under the heading Aayeena, which means "mirror" in Hindi. After a few months of this, Binod's editor told him that he needed to look in the mirror and decide what he wanted to be, a journalist in English or Hindi. The choice was easy. There were more readers for the Hindi papers but the money was in the English.

Nevertheless, while writing entirely in English, Binod found that he could not talk very easily about villages and small towns. He lacked the idiom to express his feelings directly about harvests or heavy rains that led to flooding, the excitement and then the numbing that followed the news of another caste massacre, the familiar bare roads that cut through fields and shone at night under the moon's light, the sounds of a woman's bangles coming across a pond in the dark. He wanted to talk about the routine of travel during Holi and Diwali in the unreserved compartment of third-rate trains like the Shram Jeevi Express -- but who among the readers of English newspapers in Delhi would find any appeal in such things? There were only so many times that he could remind his reader that you could not understand the pain of the man who brought your milk or drove your car unless you too needed to go back to your village every six months to find out whether the child who had four milk teeth last time had now learned to call your name when shown your photograph. (9)

The idea that Binod's writing in English feels somewhat disconnected rings true, from my experience reading of some of India's English-language newspapers. (Amitava also hints that journalistic writing in the Indian media comes alive in a different way in print in Hindi and other Indian languages -- though liveliness of the non-English presses can also pose some problems. Still, it's worth remembering that the circulation of Hindi language newspapers in particular dwarfs that of English, even at a moment when people are alternately celebrating and bemoaning the rise of Global English.)

Interestingly, the issue of the relationship to English seems to be one moment in the novel where Amitava's protagonist does not seem to be an autobiographical proxy. Though Amitava has himself come out of the Hindi belt to write exclusively in English, his own writing in English has never seemed to lack expressiveness or a sense of personal engagement.

I have described Nobody Does the Right Thing as a novel engaged in a kind of cultural translation of life in urban Bihar at the present moment in Hindi-inflected English. But one shouldn't be confused by that description into thinking that the novel is some kind of 21st century sequel to Premchand's Godaan. To get today's Bihar right, you cannot merely write about shady small-town politics, farmers, and village caste grievances, and leave it at that. (Not that Godaan was limited to that either -- in fact, even that village novel was cosmopolitan to a considerable extent.) Kumar's characters in Patna in Nobody Does the Right Thing are deeply impacted by events around the world: 9/11, the war on terror, and Indian national politics (the setting is 2004, a national election year). And yet those broader events and crises do not seem to alter certain fundamental dynamics: a way of living, a culture, and a set of social relationships remains basically intact.

The novel also expresses a more than passing passion for Hindi films, both classic and contemporary. There is quite a bit of discussion of films, from Mother India and Do Bigha Zameen, to the films of the 2000s. Real Bollywood stars make cameos in the novel from time to time, and there is a definite awareness of the financial and cultural dynamics of the Bombay film world in the novel, including even a brief reference British woman writing a dissertation about Bombay cinema -- a young woman to whom the stars seem to pay just a little too much attention.

Scattered through Kumar's novel are some great meditations on the way commercial Hindi films work in everyday life in India's small towns and villages. One of the characters in Kumar's novel describes it as follows:

Small-town people tear their shirts open when they are felling very excited. They do that when a hit song is on the screen. When some titillating dance is going on, you see coins being thrown at the screen. It's madness. They don't hold back any emotion, they don't care a damn what people think. If they want to cry, they cry or howl in the theater. In cities, audiences go to the theater with expectation, they come to enjoy the film and if you betray them, and you let them down and you can't hold them, then you'll see empty theaters the next day. They are extreme in their emotions; the city people aren't--I would say they don't know how to enjoy a Hiindi film."

This is also a novel deeply engaged with British and American literature, and intellectual life. So Amitava also works in references to George Orwell (who was born in Bihar, though few people are aware of that fact), Jean-Paul Sartre, Tennessee Williams, and many others. In short, the characters in Kumar's novel are pretty thoroughly cosmopolitan, without its characters ever having left India. (That said, it's a somewhat different kind of comopolitanism than that expressed by the writers of the 'Doon School Mafia'; the key difference here seems to be the closeness to Hindi, and the fact that the main characters remain regionally and ethno-linguistically marked.)

Finally, this is a novel that aims to reflect globalization, liberalization, and the revolution in everyday life brought about by the technological changes of the past two decades -- from cell phones to the internet. The Starr Report makes an appearance -- though in Kumar's account it's sold in bootleg Hindi translations as a pulpy paperback kind of pornography (with some completely fictional material by a translator inserted for 'paisa vasool'). Along the same lines, one of the main characters runs a cybercafe in Patna that is busted for promoting obscenity, since its clients primarily use it to look at porn in closed cubicles (sometimes as couples). And the legacy of the Tehelka arms scandal -- an internet era event, provoked by a website, rather than a conventional news source -- is not far in the background either.

* * *

Revisiting the Authenticity Debate (briefly)

A couple of years ago, I contrasted Home Products to Aravind Adiga's Booker-Prize winning novel, The White Tiger. Both are novels in English with protagonists who are from Bihar (though the state is not directly named in Adiga's novel, the location is clearly implied). Both are also novels written by diasporic journalists who had been inspired by their journalistic work. I won't rehash all of it all over again, though let me recommend an article Amitava himself wrote, mentioning The White Tiger as part of a survey of the "authenticity" debate in the Indian English novel.


Amitava's assessment lines up pretty closely with my own, though he goes in a somewhat different direction with his piece. For reference, one of my posts about Adiga's novel is here:


One could, of course, observe that it's a little dangerous for one aspiring novelist to be dismissing another novelist's work (with a superficially similar profile and theme), and to his credit Amitava readily acknowledges that potential conflict of interest in his essay, after quoting a slightly slapdash passage from Adiga's novel on the relations between men and women in a Bihari village. Here is Kumar's response to Adiga (for the passage in question, click on the first link above):

I have witnessed such men, and sometimes women, coming back to their village homes countless times. The novelist seems to know next to nothing about either the love or the despair of the people he writes about. I want to know if others, who might never have visited Bihar, read the passage above and recognize how wrong it is, how the appearance of verisimilitude belies the emotional truths of life in Bihar.

As I continued [to read Adiga's book], I found on nearly every page a familiar observation or a fine phrase, and on nearly every page inevitably something that sounds false. I stopped reading on page thirty-five.

I was anxious about my response to The White Tiger. No, not only for the suspicion about the ressentiment lurking in my breast, but also because I was aware that I might be open to the same charge of being inauthentic. My own novel Home Products, published last year, has as its protagonist a journalist who is writing about the murder of a young woman. The case is based on a well-known murder of a poet who had an illicit relationship with a married politician. Kidnapping and rape and, of course, murder, feature quite frequently in the novel's pages. By presenting these events through a journalist's eye, I tried hard to maintain a tone of observational integrity. At some level, realism had become my religion.

Incidentally, Amitava also spells out his dislikes in greater detail in an article in The Hindu from November 2008:


Another way of making this complaint: Adiga's novel claims to be a wake-up call to the "World is Flat"/"India Shining" triumphalists. But The White Tiger's anti-elitist stance is more a rhetorical pose than anything else, not really borne out by any strong familiarity with the world it describes. The fact that it is a pose is not to say that it is entirely false. But it is considerably more limited; the book is more like an Op-Ed and less like a substantial portrait of a society.



Are there flaws with Nobody Does the Right Thing? Maybe. The condensed format of the American version of the novel has slightly reduced the amount of time we spend with each character, with the result being that we don't have a very fully developed picture of some of the secondary characters in the book.

The novel also opens with an intriguing mystery regarding the murdered poetess Mala Srivastava, suggesting that it might turn out be a page turner. In fact, Nobody Does the Right Thing is more a reflective character study than a thriller, and readers looking for the excitements of a Stieg Larrson type book, full of clearly-delineated victims and scheming perpetrators, may be disappointed. Kumar's world is much grayer, with a largely sympathetic blackmailer/pornographer in Binod's cousin Rabinder.

Overall, Nobody Does the Right Thing should provoke a lively debate about life in contemporary India for readers -- both those with personal connections to the Indian subcontinent and those who don't know it very well. It has the ambitions and themes one sees in "big novels," though it comes in a pretty modest package. It admittedly doesn't give you a clean "takeaway" -- a buzzword or easy moral that can become a Tweetable tagline (i.e., "All is well!") -- but then, that's exactly the point.

Untrendy Topics: Modern Hindi Poetry

I've been doing some research on Indian writers from the 1930s-1960s for a long-term scholarly project, and in the process I've been learning about a few lesser-known Hindi and Urdu writers. In Hindi in particular, I've been interested in the "New Poetry" (Nayi Kavita) Movement, with a small group of experimental writers adapting the western, free verse style to Hindi.

For a little background on Hindi literature in the 20th century, you might start with Wikipedia; it's not bad. The New Poetry movement came out of a general flowering of Hindi poetry from the early 20th century, a style of poetry known as Chhayavad (Shadowism). Mahadevi Verma is one of the best known writers in this style; another notable figure is Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Amitabh Bachchan's father (and actually quite a good poet).

For me, the Chhayavad poetry sounds a little too pretty ("precious," as they say in Creative Writing class), though I must admit that part of the problem is that I simply don't have the Hindi vocabulary to be able to keep up with the language the Chhayavad poets tend to use. I prefer what came after, especially the New Poetry movement. The "New Poetry" style roughly resembles the modernism of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Hilda Doolittle in English literature. The language is stripped down and conversational, rather than lyrical. Some poets, like Kedarnath Singh, focus intently on conveying, with a kind of crystalline minimalism, pure images. Others are somewhat more conventional.

Below, I'll give some examples of a few favorite poems from the "New Poetry" movement, with several poems in both Hindi (Devanagri) and English.

My source today is mainly Lucy Rosenstein's "New Poetry in Hindi", which is available on Amazon for interested readers; Rosenstein prints both the Hindi originals as well as her translations.

In her introduction, Rosenstein describes how modern poetry in Hindi emerged after 1900, with Mahavirprasad Dwiwedi's promotion of poetry in Khari Boli Hindi (earlier, poetry had mainly been written in Braj Bhasha). There was an early spurt of nationalist poetry, but, partially under the influence of English Romantic poetry (Wordsworth and Shelley), a movement calling itself "Chhayavad" emerged in the 1920s. Here is an example of a few lines in the Chhayavad style, from Sumitranandan Pant's Almore ka vasant (Almora Spring):

Vidrum ou, markat kee chhaya,
Sone chaandee ka sooryatap;
Him parisal kee reshmee vaayu,
Shat ratnachhay kharg chitrit nabh!

Coral and emerald shade
sun's heat first gold then silver;
snow mountain scent on silken breezes,
a hundred jeweled brids painting the sky
(Translated David Rubin)

It may be that my own limited Hindi renders poems like this somewhat inaccessible, at least in the original. More generally, operating from the translation, I put poems like this under "sounds pretty, but..." (That's my personal taste. I have friends who love writers like Pant and Mahadevi.)

After the Chhayavad movement, the dominant stream in Hindi poetry seemed to split into two in the 1930s, with Progressives in one camp (Pragativad), and Experimentalists in the other (Prayogvad).

Progressive Poetry was part of a major movement in Indian literature that began in the 1930s. This movement is usually called the Progressive Writers Movement, and it had major literary communities in fiction, drama, as well as poetry; it also had offshoots in many different South Asian languages (earlier I have written about some Urdu writers loosely affiliated with the Progressive Writers, Sa'adat Hasan Manto, and Ismat Chughtai). As the name indicates, this was writing largely motivated by a desire to make a political intervention. A fair amount of the writing was anti-colonial, and much of it was oriented to social and economic reforms within Indian society.

Just after the Progressive trend in poetry began in the 1930s, a much smaller group of Hindi writers initiated a new, experimentalist style. Much of this writing avoided big political themes in favor of more abstract meditations. (Importantly, many of the writers in this movement overlapped with the Progressive Writers, and some were card-carrying political activists (i.e., communists). They simply didn't bring themes from the political world into their writing.

Initially the movement was spearheaded by Agyeya (also sometimes spelled Ajneya in English; his real name was Sacchidananda Hirananda Vatsayan), beginning with an anthology called Tar Saptak, in 1943.

Agyeya (whose pen-name literally means "Unknowable") is a really interesting character. He was educated at home initially, as his father didn't believe in formal schooling, though he did go on to get a Bachelors of Science at a British college. He also started an M.A. in English, but didn't finish, after he got involved in the independence movement. According to Rosenstein, Agyeya spent three years in jail (1931-1934), which proved decisive in terms of his development as a poet. He was a mass of contradictions - widely recognized as an activist and political leader, Agyeya was also deeply solitary in some ways. Raised as a traditional Brahmin, he also exemplified modernism in his intellectual and literary output.

Here is an example of Agyeya's poetry, in the Experimental ("New Poetry") style:



चुप-चाप

चुप-चाप चुप चाप
झरने का स्वर
हम में भर जाय

चुप-चाप चुप-चाप
शरद की चांदनी
झील की लहरों पर तीर आय,

चुप-चाप चुप-चाप
जीवन का रहस्य
जो कहा न जाय, हमारी
ठहरी आँखों में गहराय,

चुप-चाप चुप-चाप
हम पुलकित विराट में दुबे
पर विराट हम में मिल जाय --

चुप चाप चुप च [??] प




Quietly



Quietly
May the murmur of water falling
Fill us,

Quietly
May the autumn moon
Float on the ripples of the lake,

Quietly
May life's unspoken mystery
Deepen in our still eyes,

Quietly
May we, ecstatic, be immersed in the expanse
Yet find it in ourselves

Quiet ... ly ...
(translated by Lucy Rosenstein)

Another favorite New Poetry writer is Raghuvir Sahay, who came of age a generation after Agyeya.

Here is an example of a Raghuvir Sahay poem I really like:

आज फिर

आज फिर शुरू हुआ जीवन.
आज मैंने यिक छोटी-सी सरल-सी कविता पढी.
आज मैंने सूरज को डूबता देर तक देखा.
आज मैंने शीतल जल से जी भर स्नान किया.
आज यिक छोटी-सी बच्ची आयी, किलक मेरे कन्धे चढी.
आज मैंने आदि से अन्त तक यिक पूरा गान किया.

Today Anew

Today life started anew.
Today I read a short, simple poem.
Today I watched the sun set for a long time.
Today I bathed to my heart's content in cool water.
Today a little girl came and shouting with delight climbed onto my shoulders.
Today I sang a whole song, from beginning to end.
Life started anew today.
(Translated Lucy Rosenstein)

Another poem in Rosenstein's collection that clicked with me is by Shakunt Mathur, one of the leading female lights of the Experimental/New Poetry movement.

Here is one of Shakunt Mathur'spoems:


तुम सुन्दर हो, घर सुन्दर हो

जब में थका हुआ घर आओं, तुम सुन्दर हो घर सुन्दर हो
चाहे दिन भर बहे पसीने
कितने भी हो कपडे सीने
बच्चा भी रोता हो गीला
आलू भे हो आधा छीला

जब में थका हुआ घर आओं, तुम सुन्दर हो घर सुन्दर हो
सब तूफान रुके हो घर के
मुझको देखो आँखों भर के
न जुड़े मेंइ फूल सजाई
न तितली से वासन, न नखरे

जब में थका हुआ घर आओं, तुम सुन्दर हो घर सुन्दर हो
अधलेटी हो तुम सोफे पर
फारिं मैगजीन पढ़ती हो
शीशे सा घर साफ पड़ा हो
आहत पर छोंकी पड़ती हो

तुम कविता तुम लिखो सलौनी, में काफी हूँ, तुम प्रियतर हो
जब में थका हुआ घर आओं, तुम सुन्दर हो घर सुन्दर हो


You should be beautiful, the house should be beautiful
When I return home tired you should be beautiful, the house should be beautiful
Even if all day sweat poured
However many clothes you sewed
Even if the child doesn't yield
And the potato is half-unpeeled
When I return home tired you should be beautiful, the house should be beautiful
All storms in the house should be stilled
You should look at me with eyes filled
Without flowers in your hair,
Showy clothes, flirtatious air

When I return home tired you should be beautiful, the house should be beautiful
Reclining on the sofa,
You should be reading a foreign journal
The house should shine like crystal
My steps' sound should startle you

Don't write poetry, beauty, I am enough, you are loved
When I return home tired you should be beautiful, the house should be beautiful.
(Translated Lucy Rosenstein)

Clearly a feminist sensibility! Incidentally, in Hindi some of the lines rhyme, which Rosenstein reproduces in her translation. The language is simple but elegant and the picture she's painting seems true - and this combination is what I like most about the "New Poetry."

Finally, here is Vinay Dharwadker's translation of Kedarnath Singh's "On Reading a Love Poem". This poem isn't included in Rosenstein's volume, though several other wonderful Kedarnath Singh poems are in her collection.


Kedarnath Singh (b. 1934): ON READING A LOVE POEM

When I'd read that long love poem
I closed the book and asked --
Where are the ducks?

I was surprised that they were nowhere
even far into the distance

It was in the third line of the poem
or perhaps the fifth
that I first felt
there might be ducks here somewhere

I'd heard the flap flap of their wings
but that may have been my illusion

I don't know for how long
that woman
had been standing in the twelfth line
waiting for a bus

The poem was completely silent
about where she wanted to go
only a little sunshine
sifted from the seventeenth floor
was falling on her shoulders

The woman was happy
at least there was nothing in her face to suggest
that by the time she reached the twenty-first line
she'd disappear completely
like every other woman

There were sakhu trees
standing where the next line began
the trees were spreading
a strange dread through the poem

Every line that came next
was a deep disturbing fear and doubt
about every subsequent line


If only I'd remembered--
it was in the nineteenth line
that the woman was slicing potatoes

She was slicing
large round brown potatoes
inside the poem
and the poem was becoming
more and more silent
more solid

I think it was the smell
of freshly chopped vegetables
that kept the woman alive
for the next several lines

By the time I got to the twenty-second line
I felt that the poem was changing its location
like a speeding bullet
the poem had whizzed over the woman's shoulder
towards the sakhu trees

There were no lines after that
there were no more words in the poem
there was only the woman
there were only
her shoulders her back
her voice--
there was only the woman
standing whole outside the poem now
and breaking it to pieces

(translated by Vinay Dharwadker) [SOURCE]
I hope you enjoyed at least some of those poems.

Murakami, "The Big Sleep," Allusions to Proust

As I have been teaching Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World this spring to undergraduates, I have been tracking some of the allusions and reference points. Some, like the references to Turgenev's Rudin and Stendhal's The Red and the Black, seem to be relatively straightforward allusions, though admittedly I haven't gone to the Turgenev yet to see if there might be more to it.

However, I did notice something potentially interesting with regards to an allusion I was able to check more closely. Murakami briefly mentions Hawks' film adaptation of The Big Sleep, based on the Raymond Chandler novel. It occurs about a third of the way through the novel, and interpreting it raises some interesting interpretive challenges. Going well beyond simple correspondences between the two texts, Murakami's allusion to The Big Sleep also appears to be an allusion to Hawks and Chandler's own literary allusions (often figured dimissively -- as examples of what not to read, i.e., Proust). In other words, Murakami's invocation of Hawks' film is a kind of versioning or remixing that channels not just a voice or a character from the source text, but the source text's entire orientation to literature. There is only one instance of a direct allusion to The Big Sleep in Murakami's novel, but as many as a dozen instances of what I might call buried allusions, which are only legible once we've applied the key represented by the first, and begun to read Murakami's novel through a Big Sleep lens.

To begin with, here is the passage in Murakami that names The Big Sleep:

I finished my business and hung up, then went into the living room and relaxed on the sofa with a beer to watch a video of Humphrey Bogart's "Key Largo." I love Lauren Bacall in "Key Largo." Of course, I love Bacall in "The Big Sleep" too, but in "Key Largo" she's practically allegorical.


The reference to Key Largo might be somewhat of a red herring -- the parallels that I can think of between Murakami's novel and that other film aren't so interesting to me (both books feature father-daughter relationships and outsider protagonists). But there are more than a dozen between The Big Sleep and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and at least some are examples of the "versioning" mode I alluded to above.

Let's start with a sample allusion from Raymond Chandler's novel (the dialogue in the film from this passage is taken, word-for-word, from Chandler), from the second encounter between Marlow and Vivian Regan (Vivian Rutledge in the movie):

"Well, you do get up," she said, wrinkling her nose at the faded red settee, the two odd semi-easy chairs, the net curtains that needed laundering and the boy's size library table with the venerable magazines on it to give the place a professional touch. "I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust."

"Who's he?" I put a cigarette in my mouth and stared at her. She looked a little pale and strained, but she looked like a girl who could function under a strain.

"A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn't know him."

"Tut, tut," I said. "Come into my boudoir."

She stood up and said: "We didn't get along very well yesterday. Perhaps I was rude."


The irony of Chandler's allusion to Proust is that he is both rejecting him as simultaneously too highbrow for Philip Marlowe -- and too dirty (that is to say, too much of a "connoisseur of degenerates"). Vivian's quip, "You wouldn't know him," comes across as a surface compliment, but actually it's a dig at Marlow's lower class status, and it quickly becomes clear that she actually finds that Marlow is exactly the "connoisseur of degenerates" she says he isn't.

Now, here is a moment from the beginning of Murakami's novel, from the standard Birnbaum translation:

Proust?

‘Marcel Proust?’ I asked her.

She gave me a look. Then she repeated: ‘Proust.’ I gave up the effort and fell back in line behind her, trying for the life of me to come up with other lip movements that corresponded to ‘Proust.’ Truest? … Brew whist?... Blue is it?... One after the other, quietly to myself, I pronounced strings of meaningless syllables, but none seemed to match. I could only conclude that she had indeed said, ‘Proust.’ But what I couldn’t figure was, what was the connection between the long corridor and Marcel Proust? (9)


As is often the case in Murakami, the rhetorical question the protagonist is asking himself as he attempts to make sense of the professor's daughter's mysterious invocation of Proust, is actually an interpretive question that the reader might do well to apply to the act of reading. Without the reference point to The Big Sleep, there's no direct answer.

The reason the professor's daughter can't speak aloud is later explained (her father has, through one of his neurophysiological inventions, accidentally put her on 'mute'). But what is never explained is what exactly Proust might be doing here, which leads me to think that this reference to Proust is only in Murakami's novel as a kind of buried allusion to a somewhat analogous (but much more cogent) conversation in the Chandler novel and Hawks film.

There's also a more conventional interpretation of the allusion to Proust. Hard Boiled Wonderland..., after all, is a novel that is at least partly about the attempt to recover lost memories. The "End of the World" sections clearly feature a protagonist whose memories are inaccessible to him (they are with his "shadow"), and one of his goals is to try and recover them, and explain how he got there. The "Hard-Boiled Wonderland" protagonist has some other connections to Proust -– for instance, after his "shuffling activation," the smell of fruits sets of random chains of association for him.

Finally, there are a number of other strong connections between The Big Sleep and Murakami's novel, some of which are in the same orbit as the "Proust" connection. Both texts prominently feature eroticized female librarian guide figures, who help the detective/protagonist decode the mysterious signs around them. In Murakami, the librarian helps the protagonist sort out the possible significance of the unicorn skull the professor has sent him. In Chandler & Hawks' The Big Sleep, there are actually two librarians, one helpful and flirtatious, while the other (who works for the pornographer Geiger) gives him the run-around.

The librarians and bookstore proprietors in The Big Sleep operate around the same discursive axis as Vivian's quip about Proust, that "connoisseur of degenerates." That Geiger's ostensible "rare books" operation is a front for a pornography ring is not an accident. Like Proust, whose literary output must be understood as "rarefied" in market/commodity terms, the high-brow posture conceals the presence of moral rot, the discovery of which is the detective's primary job.

And of course, both texts prominently feature characters who have an unconscious life over which their conscious selves have only limited control, though the content of that unconscious is wildly divergent. In Chandler, writing in the era of Freud, our unconscious is a space of sexual rapacity and exhibitionism as well as violence. In Murakami, by contrast the "End of the World" is a kind of utopian alternate reality surgically implanted inside the protagonist's mind without his knowledge. (I am not sure how much can be done here...)

To intelligibly graph the specific parallels between The Big Sleep and the Murakami actually proves to be quite difficult, though of course Murakami's is far from the only text (even within his own body of work) where this kind of problem arises. Does anyone know of a critic who has done a schematic study that might help us describe the different modes of allusion (specifically oriented to the kind of thing happening with Proust above, for starters) that are often seen in self-consciously intertextual postmodern fiction?

Changing Blog Host: Electrostani.com

Hi folks,

As you've already seen, I've not been blogging actively much over the last few months. It's a mix of being busy and also not feeling the pull in the same way I once did.

Blogger, the service I've used to publish this blog from the beginning, has recently announced that they're discontinuing FTP support for Blogger in the next few weeks. That means I won't be able to have this blog hosted at my Lehigh webspace while also using their service. The stated reason is that FTP and SFTP create a large number of technical problems -- which rings true, since I've never quite been able to get Blogger to update my blog templates right.

It turns out it's fairly easy to move Blogger-based blogs to a custom domain name hosted by Google. I used to own www.amardeepsingh.com, but I let it go, and now some parasite company owns the domain.

As a result, for now I'm going to be using WWW.ELECTROSTANI.COM, which is also my Twitter name. The entire blog should already be available there, though most of the links will point back to posts at Lehigh. All new posts will appear there.

Please update your bookmarks.