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Punjabi: steady but
spectacular growth
by
Jaspal Singh
PUNJABI developed
into a distinct language towards the beginning of
the second millennium of the Christian era like
most other modern Indian languages of North
India. During the past one thousand years the
most important texts which symbolise the Punjabi zeitgeist
in its entirety have been the Guru Granth
Sahib and "Heer Waris". The former was
compiled towards the end of the 16th century and
the latter some two centuries after that.
The Guru Granth
Sahib is a spiritual journey of the Punjabi soul
that always yearned for a reunion with the divine
in absolute peace and harmony. "Heer
Waris" is the temporal itinerary of the
Punjabi psyche with its quest for romance and
adventure.
These two
seminal compositions shaped the subsequent
Punjabi literature and intellection. Both of them
are revolutionary texts in the sense that they
changed the order of epistemes constituting the
existing structure of knowledge in North-West
India.
The Guru Granth
Sahib launched the Indian version of reformation
something parallel to the European Reformation
that redrew the map of medieval cosmology. Man as
a doer and knower was again brought back to the
centre-stage of the universe after a gap of many
centuries since the Buddha.
The Granth
ushered in a sweeping socio-political
transformation of Punjab. Its epistemology though
spiritual in form had a direct bearing on the
political structure of the epoch. At the cultural
level "Heer Waris" liberated the
innermost resonances of the Punjabi geist that
found its articulation through this melodious
muse.
Till the end of
the 19th century, in addition to these
compositions, the Punjabi language had a corpus
of stirring romances in the "qissa"
tradition. Mention may be made of Pillu’s
"Mirza", Fazal Shah’s
"Sohini", Hasham’s
"Sassi" and Qadar Yaar’s
"Puran Bhagat".
Apart from this,
there is a rich treasure of Sufi kaav by
Bulle Shah, Shah Hussain and others. Two other
significant Punjabi texts of the 19th century are
"Panth Parkash" by Rattan Singh Bhangu
and "Jang Nama" by Shah Mohammed.
On this
epistemological foundation the 20th century
Punjabi literature flourished. Bhai Vir Singh is
the most important literary figure at the
beginning of the 20th century. He is the first to
compose modern Punjabi poetry which is distinct
from the earlier "qissa" tradition,
both in form and content. He is also the father
of Punjabi novel as Richardson is that of
English.
The first
Punjabi novel "Sundri" by him appeared
in 1898, just at the turn of the century. This
was set during the first half of the 18th century
when Sikhs were hunted in towns and villages.
Mughal rule was on the decline and disintegrating
day by day. A bloody struggle for power was on
between the Sikhs and the Mughals.
The first novel
of Punjabi is about those turbulent times when
Punjab was witnessing the emergence of a new
historical force on the political horizon.
Subsequently
Punjabi novel matured as an established genre in
the hands of Nanak Singh. He wrote dozens of
novels, "Chitta Lahu" being almost a
masterpiece.
Nanak Singh was
imbued with the reformatory zeal of the times
which is sharply reflected in his writings. But
the later novelists of Punjabi such as Kartar
Singh Duggal, Surinder Singh Narula, Jaswant
Singh Kanwal, Gurdial Singh, Dalip Kaur Tiwana,
Ram Sarup Ankhi, to name only a few, concentrated
mainly on sociological and existential themes.
In Punjabi
poetry Bhai Vir Singh’s "Mattak
Hulare" (1922) is perhaps the first modern
compilation. With the publication of
"Bijlian de Haar"(1927) and
"Lehran de Haar"(1928) Bhai Vir Singh
became the most celebrated Punjabi poet of his
time.
During those
very days Prof Puran Singh appeared like a meteor
on the firmament of Punjabi poetry. He added a
new dimension to it. Blank verse, which was
seldom used in Punjabi until then, got a pride of
place at his hands. His "Khulle Maidan"
and "Khulle Ghund" dazzled the Punjabi
readers.
Another Punjabi
text that presents a panorama of rural life
before partition is Lala Dhani Ram Chatrik’s
"Chandanwari", a collection of poems
portraying variegated colours of the Punjab
landscape.
The first half
of the 20th century also saw the emergence of
Punjabi humour and satire in verse. S.S. Charan
Singh Shahid was the leading humorist of the age.
His "Beparwaian", a collection of
satirical poems, makes pleasant reading.
Punjab had a
long tradition of folk theatre but formal
literary plays were attempted only in the
beginning of the 20th century. Bawa Budh
Singh’s "Chanderhari" and Bhai Vir
Singh’s "Raja Lakhdata Singh"
appeared in the first decade of the century.
"Suhag"
(Dulhan) by I.C. Nanda is, however, treated as
the first Punjabi drama with some sense of stage
and theatre. He staged his plays in colleges.
They pleaded for social change and were simple in
plot.
During those
very days Norah Richard was also making efforts
to develop theatre in Punjab. Later Harcharan
Singh, Balwant Gargi, Gurdial Singh Khosla, Kirpa
Sagar and others wrote and staged plays which
were a little more sophisticated.
Towards the last
years of the 20th century the most active
playwrights and theatre personalities in Punjabi
are Surjit Singh Sethi, Harsharn Singh, Gursharn
Singh, Devinder Daman, Atamjit, Ajmer Singh
Aulakh and so on. Some of them are no more now.
Punjabi short
story is a late entrant in the literary field.
Kartar Singh Duggal, Sant Singh Sekhon, Sujan
Singh, Gurbaksh Singh, Kulwant Singh Virk and
Santokh Singh Deer are almost contemporaries.
Kulwant Singh Virk is reckoned as the most
popular story writer of this generation.
Nowadays Punjabi
short story writers like Ajit Kaur, Prem Parkash,
Gulzar Singh Sandhu, Mohan Bhandari, Gurbachan
Bhullar, Waryam Sandhu, Jasvir Bhullar, Baldev
Dhaliwal, Prem Gorkhi and a few others have done
some of the finest short stories in this part of
the world.
The Russian
Revolution of 1917, the great depression of
1929-33, the Spanish civil war and the rise of
fascism in Germany and Italy were some of the
events that gave an impetus to the progressive
movement in literature. Almost all Punjabi
writers with the exception of Bhai Vir Singh were
associated with it.
This movement
was anti-feudal with pro-liberal humanistic
ideals. Gurbaksh Singh Preetlari became its main
spokesman through his popular journal Preetlari.
Mohan Singh’s "Saawe Pattar"is the
most popular anthology of progressive poetry.
Other poets of this era are Amrita Pritam, Bawa
Balwant, Pritam Singh Safeer and so on.
Essay form in
Punjabi had a good beginning but it could not
remain a popular literary form. Principal Teja
Singh, Lal Singh Kamla Akali, Gurbaksh Singh
Preetlari wrote good prose.
In literary
criticism Sant Singh Sekhon’s
"Sahitarth" remains a masterpiece. In
the last quarter of the 20th century Attar Singh,
Kishan Singh, Prof Pritam Singh, Jasbir Singh
Ahluwalia, Harnam Singh Shan, Tejwant Singh Gill,
Raghbir Singh Sirjana, Kesar Singh Kesar,
Joginder Singh Rahi, Gurbaksh Singh Frank. T.R.
Vinod, Satinder Singh Noor, Ravinder Singh Ravi,
Jagbir Singh, Tarlok Singh Kanwar, Gurbachan,
Karanjit Singh and others have produced rich
critical literature in Punjabi.
Even the younger
lot like Jaswinder Singh, Satish Verma, Surjit
Bhatti, Harbhajan Singh Bhatia, Harchand Singh
Bedi and Amarjit Singh Kaang have remained quite
active in recent years.
In the sixties,
seventies and the eighties the most popular
Punjabi poets have been Shiv Kumar Batalvi, Dr
Haribhajan Singh, Jasvir Singh Ahluwalia, Sohan
Singh Meesha, Jagtar, Surjit Pattar,Paash,
Harinder Mehboob, Surjit Hans, Manjit Tiwana, Lal
Singh Dil, Sukhbir, etc. Shiv Kumar’s
"Loona" created a flutter in the
sixties as did Paash’s "Sade Samian
Wich" and "Loh Katha" in the
seventies.
In addition to
literary compositions some of the Punjabi writers
concentrated on the philosophy of religion.
Mention may be made of Kapur Singh ICS, Gopal
Singh Dardi, Sahib Singh and Jasvir Singh
Ahluwalia.
In the 20th
century some Punjabi writers tried to collect
folk literary forms of Punjab. Dr Mohinder Singh
Randhawa, Devinder Satarthi, Wanjara Bedi, Nahar
Singh and a few others did some field work and
came out with a respectable collection of folk
literature of Punjab.
The role of
encyclopaedists, lexicographers and text
interpreters cannot be underestimated in the
development of a language. Scholars like Bhai
Kahn Singh Nabha, Mayya Singh, Principal Teja
Singh and Harkirat Singh ("Shabad Jor
Kosh") and a few others are important in
this field. Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha’s
"Mahan Kosh"(encyclopaedia of Sikh
literature) is a monumental work of its own kind.
By the end of
the 20th century, Punjabi language and literature
in the Gurmukhi script have acquired a huge
corpus of literary creations in various genres.
But sadly, very little has been done in Punjabi
in the field of social sciences and philosophical
ideas. A language does not go beyond the
entertainment level unless it becomes a vehicle
of ideas and intellection.
Now at the onset
of the 21st century Punjabi writers and scholars
should concentrate more on this aspect of the
language.
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Word: strangled here,
strident elsewhere
by M.
L. Raina
IN a poem that may as well
be the epigraph to this piece, Philip Larkin, a
distinguished minor poet of our day, recognises
the imbroglios of our dragon-ridden century :
"Things are tougher than we are, just/as
earth will always respond/However we mess it
about;/Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:/The
tides will be clean beyond/— But what do I
feel now? Doubt?"
If there is one
thing that stamps the temper of our century, it
is doubt whose current legacy Karl Marx and
Sigmund Freud bequeathed to us in the late 19th
and early 20th century. We made Faustian contract
with the engines and technologies of change, to a
point where the very human languages ceased to be
human. The instruments of progress evacuated our
human languages of their inner core of meanings
that are the tacit significations not to be
specified in any formal language.
We progressed
but doubt remained, because in our drive to
ever-new milestones, we lost what sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus, the basic fabric
of our language and its spontaneous intimations.
We became exiles from the word just as we became
exiles in distant lands and climes, forced by our
century’s incessant carnage. Having lost the
word, we lost that innate sense of belonging
Wittgenstein and Freud called heimet,
home.
But the century
that is about to wind down amidst the continuing
clamour of military ordnance (in Chechnya,
Rwanda, Kosovo and Kargil), has not lacked those
who sought meaning outside the politically
ordained but debased languages of statesmen and
power- brokers. For me the people who made a
difference in the all-pervading miasmas of our
century are a philosopher, a novelist and a poet
who, with their solitary tunnelling through the
gloom kept the lights burning for us all.
Ernst Bloch,
James Joyce and Paul Celan are not the only ones
who built imaginative utopias of language,
comprehensive philosophical thought and fictional
structure to affirm Nietzsche’s belief that
"we have art in order not to die of
truth". Personally, however, I would
celebrate them as the supreme voices of
resistance and counter-energy which upheld the
power of language and free-wheeling speculation
to confront the despair of our century.
Ernst Bloch is
nobody’s idea of a Marxist revolutionary;
yet in "The Principle of Hope" he
reinfused the Marxist doctrine with the spirit of
utopia, of an integral outlook which while being
receptive to the revolutionary change in Russia,
kept its sights fixed on the future. As a
philosopher he gave theoretical shape to a vision
which is all-encompassing and at the same time,
responsive to what he calls "the little
daydreams of the present". To the
"closed, static concept of being", to
the "degrading suffering, anxiety,
self-alienation, nothingness" — all the
catch-phrases by which existentialists and others
of their ilk set out to define this
century’s malaise, Bloch offered the
antidote of a "propensity towards something,
latency of something, and this intended something
means fulfilment of the intending".
For him utopia
is a total reconciliation of the human and the
natural, being-in-history of classical Marxism
and the "not-yet-conscious" of
aesthetic and sensual possibility. It is through
such totality that man recovers the integral
wholeness denied to him by false revolutionary
doctrines designed primarily for social and
economic renovation of the existing systems.
Bloch’s
rich metaphoric non-linear prose reconciles the
revolutionary message of Marxism with the
heritage of religious, mythic and mystical
speculations, endowing his philosophy with a
visionary gleam that remains what he calls the
very principle of hope he charted in his
monumental work. His bold utopian thought has
withstood the seductions of Marxist promises and
continues to withstand the blandisments of
today’s other power-mongers.
If utopia is the
mainstay of Bloch’s thought, myth in Joyce
remains a buffer between reality and desire. In
"Ulysses", in my opinion the archetypal
novel of our century, he demonstrated the power
of language to arrest the homelessness of the
post-war generation in a structure that
encompassed the entire history and literature of
the world.
Through this
novel wander all the major heroes of the classic
literature of the past, giving credence to
Blake’s claim that an artist can hold
eternity in a "grain of sand". For him
language not only mirrors reality but, more to my
point, transfigures it. For him the mundane world
is far more extensive than it is for most of us,
and its map is thick with configurations of fact
and symbol.
Into his novel
went actual people and events of a particular
June day. He collected shards and shreds of their
life in a linguistic structure that both revealed
their actuality and made them patterns in a vast
network of relations. Thus Homer rubs shoulders
with Joyce’s contemporaries, and history
becomes a continuous trail linking past and
present in contradictory but meaningful ways.
"Ulysses"
is a world in itself, fashioned by all the
resources of language that Joyce commands. Having
exiled himself from Ireland, he reconstructs his
city, Dublin, in all its squalor and glory.
Dublin becomes the vehicle for Joyce’s
linguistic exercise to capture life in its flux
and simultaneously render it fluid and
overlapping. This is the utopia of
language’s making which provides a stay
against chaos, to use an American poet’s
phrase. The utter incestuousness with which his
language combines high speech and vulgar argot,
the unbridled libertinage of his play with the
various styles of the English literary language
and the inherent belief in the immanence of world
in the word — these are not available in any
other writer of our century. "Ulysses"
becomes both the roadmap and a milestone in the
20th century’s image of itself.
And all this in
the service of a small but significant truth
— the sanctity of home, of the necessity of
returning to where you belong. In life he never
returned. But in this novel he created a
surrogate home, as rich and sensuous in its
nurturing powers as any.
A Romanian Jew
who suffered exile and harassment, Paul Celan
captured the age’s spirit by using German,
the language of his tormentors. As if to prove
Adorno wrong over the prospect of poetry after
Auschwitz, he answered the question "how may
one bless...ashes in German" in a body of
work in which language remains secure in the
midst of other losses. He knew the murderous
power of language that the Nazis exploited to the
hilt. But he also knew that language alone could
provide him with "ways of a voice to a
receptive you", "a desperate
dialogue" and "a sort of
homecoming". That is why in the poems
"So Many Constellations" and
"Meridian", he accepts his mission to
speak, name names and create new realities from
the debris of Nazi ruin.
Loss, death and
absence are Celan’s points of departure, but
the power of the word overcomes their pain. He
admonishes us to examine the undeclared
avoidances of our discourse and in that
admonition lies his relevance. His poems speak
with outrage and remembrance and preserve an
ethical apprehension of individual dignity which
makes the horror of his experiences seem
inconsequential.
In this our
blood-smeared century his kind of poetry could
still reassure if not save.
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Long shadow of light
by
Surjit Hans
LIVES of men and those of
nations are made by forces beyond their control.
The light and long shadow of Bolshevik Russia
attracted the finest flower of humanity and
blighted the life of half a continent plus
one-sixth of the globe.
The Promethean
dream was turning into a nightmare. "One Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was
published in 1962 in the Soviet Union. It was a
moral, intellectual duty of a socialist to know
the situation and think of course correction, if
possible. I published the Punjabi translation of
Solzhenitsyn’s novel in 1970 in Lakeer.
There was such a profound will to disbelieve on
the part of progressive readers that their
hostility made the journal pack up.
After being
moderately fluent in Russian, and at my own
expense, I visited Moscow in 1973 not to see and
hear what was officially permitted but to have a
first-hand experience on my own. There was a
surprise. The Russian communists at the time were
more unpopular than the Congressmen in India, not
a mean achievement. The people working in the
offices were more inefficient and unhelpful than
the babus in our country.
"Hoping
Against Hope", Nadezhda Mandelstaum
(Penguin, 1975), lets you know the socialist
misery in all its local colour. There is a
punning reference to the author in the title of
the book. Nadezhda in Russian means
"hope". Mandelstaum, the second
greatest Russian poet of the century, was sent to
internal exile because he wrote a poem against
Stalin at the height of Russian famine in the
twenties. He perished in his second exile.
It would take
some finding to come across a literary critic as
perspicaciously involved as Nadezhda,
Mandelstaum’s wife. The seeds of progressive
writing were sown in the twenties to ripen in the
nineties when not a single Soviet writer, famous
or infamous, has protested against the
introduction of capitalism in Russia. Be it
enough to say that thousands of (wo)men hopefully
looked forward to death which would end their
wretchedness.
As an ill-known
but not an infamous writer in Punjabi, "The
Social History of Art" (in four volumes) by
Arnold Houser (Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1962),
came handy to me. All the arts are not equally
amendable to the advancement of the interest of
the working masses. Music has served the tyrants
more than the people, except folk music. Equally
none knows how to revolutionise folk music which
is conservative by nature.
To date
architecture has failed to design successfully
working class housing estates and college
hostels. The success in building stadia should be
an occasion to worry, not for celebration.
Painting is the primer of illiterate societies.
What after literacy?
Short story can
surprise; it has very little scope to educate.
Only the novel can. (That the maturity of novel
in the ex-imperial countries and its backwardness
in the dependent countries has something to do
with the power to mould and observe reality is a
later discovery.)
A theoretical
discussion of the across-the-board connection
between class and art is not very fruitful.
Paradoxically
the demise of the Soviet Union has liberated
imagination. The future is not obliged to be what
it was told. In the twenties Simmel bracketed
communism and psychoanalysis. Both claimed to
know the secret of life (and history)only to be
absorbed in the study of the secret at the cost
of life. They were destined to be reduced to
sects. Interestingly both died in the eighties.
We have not
heard the last of socialism. The failure of
Seattle WTO meet and the roll-back of GMcrops
have been achieved by non- governmental
organisations. Not by the "vanguard" of
the toilers which had appropriated their
consciousness.
As an off and on
teacher I had to be interested in the quality of
argument to appreciate a work and possibly to
advance my own logical skill. "The Age of
Capital 1840-1875" by E.J Hobsbawm,
(Weidenfeld &Nicolson, 1975) is unsurpassed.
The great man lets you know; 1) what Marx knew
about capital; 2) what a few contemporaries knew
additionally that Marx was not aware of; and 3)
how much extra we know because of later
researches. A reviewer in the Guardian confessed
his lyrical enthusiasm for the book minus
critical competence.
"Masochism
in Sex and Society" (originally "Joy
out of Suffering") by Theodor Reik (Grove
Press, New York, 1941) is a marvel of logic in
psychology — how observations can point to
contrary directions pretty long. Quite simply
masochism reverses the order of crime and
punishment. A masochist gets punished before
enjoying his transgression. In society martyrs,
saints, dissidents suffer in the present to glory
in the future. There is an element of
theatricality. In mystic poetry (of suffering)
the lyrical quality springs more from
theatricality than from the necessity of
experience.
"Shamans,
Mystics and Doctors" by Sudhir Kakar
(OUP,Delhi, 1982) does our academic establishment
proud. He describes in ordinary language what a
folk-medicine man is doing. A translation in
psychological terminology follows along with the
result, again described in plain language.
Society would not rid itself of shamans and witch
doctors unless it cures itself if it does. Yes, tantriks,
too.
"Guru Nanak
in History" by J.S. Grewal (PU, Chandigarh,
1969) is a solid achievement. Contemporary
society, politics and religion are described in
detail, leading to the taking up of Guru Nanak
responses to them. This is one sure way of
understanding Guru Nanak in the absence of
reliable biographical information. Incidentally
God has no biography, a saint can do without it.
History has been
my potboiler, a living but not life. As an
outsider I should be able to see things the
insiders cannot. Of course, I cannot claim to be
a heavyweight which only they can. The subject
has moved beyond kings and battles, facts and
causes, colonialism and nationalism.
The great French
historian Marc Bloch aspired to the writing of
history of emotions. "Centuries of
Childhood: A Social History of Family" by
Philippe Aries (Penguin 1977), "The Hour of
Our Death" by Philippe Aries (Alfred Knopf,
N.Y. 1981) are unique achievements. Aries is a
Frenchman, belonging to the annales
school, working for a fruit company in America,
not much known in our country.
Childhood (as an
institution) is a post-Renaissance phenomenon
though physically there were children in earlier
ages, too. Considered manikin, his transgression
was an aggravating circumstance right upto the
18th century because he would later grow into a
bigger criminal. This is the exact opposite of
practice today. The pupils sometimes shot their
teachers. In most of history, education was the
only route to upward social mobility by the poor.
The middle-class takeover is a 17th century
development.
Equally, the
changing attitude to death is a sobering thought.
Modern society is choking itself for lack of
expression of grief.
"The
Natural History of Love" by Morton M. Hunt
(Hutchinson, 1960) would cure you of your belief
in the universality of human nature. Of "The
Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the
Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800" edited by
Lynn Hunt (Zone Books, N.Y 1993) I wrote in The
Tribune that only a fool would lend this book and
a knave return it.
Lastly
"Mohammed" by Maxime Rodinson (Penguin,
1977) has been professionally useful to me.
Rodinson identified the early group of Muslims
from an analysis of the theological imagery of
the Quran. I did the same to socially locate the
followers of Guru Nanak from my reading of his
compositions. The changing social composition of
the Sikhs is the key to their history and their
literature, giving rise to different genres of
Janamsakhi, Gurbilas and reformist novel. The
advent of Sikh rulers about 1765 was also the
beginning of a period of forgeries by seekers of
patronage
It would be
false on my part to end on an optimistic note. In
our country for about a century the brave aspired
to revolution; the decent ones, to secularism.
Now both are defunct.
History is
blessed with a squint vision. You keep one eye on
the past and have the other on the future. If the
future is dark, you can hardly shed light on the
past. I have said goodbye to history so that I
can whistle in the dark to make hope triumph over
experience. The flag is flying on lower pinnacles
if not on the Kremlin.
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Vikram Seth’s unknown
book
by
Parshotam Mehra
IN a long and by no means
uneventful span of years, literally hundreds of
books have come this reviewer’s way. Not a
few were easy to skim through; others stayed on
the desk for a while; still others became
compulsive reading. Both for their own sake and
the immense satisfaction and pleasure they gave.
It is by no means easy to bring them back to
life. In the event, the lines that follow must
confine themselves to a very few which stand out.
As a young
undergraduate in the late 1930s, G.M.
Trevelyan’s "History of England",
which has run into any number of editions and
reprints since its first appearance in 1926, was
a superb introduction to the Muse. Its mastery of
the subject is unrivalled; its sheer literary
delight is compelling. Two passages in that
remarkable work of scholarship still come back.
"If the Papacy was, as Hobbes called it,
‘no other than the ghost of the deceased
Roman Emire, sitting crowned upon the grave
thereof’, it was a living ghost and not a
mere phantasm."
And again:
"The very limits of the reform effected in
1832, with which modern criticism is often
impatient, had the advantage of keeping unbroken
the tradition of upper class connection with
political life and avoiding the development of a
class of ‘professional politicians".
Long Master of
Trinity at Cambridge and author of several
best-sellers, Trevelyan thought it was the duty
of the historian to make his subject as
fascinating as possible. And never conceal this
fascination under a heap of learning which ought
to underlie but not overwhelm written history.
In the early
1950s, a distinguished political geographer
opened up for me the vast empty spaces of
China’s land frontiers. Professor Owen
Lattimore’s seminal work, "Inner Asian
Frontiers of China" (1940), has gone into a
second edition and a reprint and still remains a
classic. I had the privilege of studying with him
as a graduate student. His mastery of languages
was unique: Chinese, Russian, Mongol, Manchu, and
French, besides his native American English.
As an
indefatigable traveller, he acquired a first-hand
understanding of the Great Wall frontier of
China, from Manchuria, through Inner Mongolia, to
Chinese Turkestan. It helped him in a better
construction of certain aspects of Chinese
history through a deeper understanding of nomad
history. A key to the history of Central Asia,
Lattimore was convinced, lay in a proper
appreciation of the fluctuating relationship
between the steppes the nomads inhabited and the
mainland.
Not only was
Lattimore a stimulating teacher with his lectures
attracting in record attendance, his books too
read remarkably well. Distinguished for its
clarity, he had a style of his own: indicative,
interpretative, suggestive, provocative.
Two short
passages may help recapture it. The rule of the
Dalai Lamas "does not represent the
extension of the power of Lhasa over the country.
On the contrary, it was founded on the projection
to-wards Lhasa of the numerically weaker but
strategically stronger Tibetans of the north,
allied first with the Mongols and then with the
Manchu emperors of China.
Again, (British)
India’s North-West Frontier was
"clearly comparable to the Great Wall
frontier of China, with the ‘Inner
Mongolia’ of tribal districts and states...
running into the ‘Durand Line’. Beyond
the Durand Line is the ‘Outer Mongolia’
of Afghanistan with Baluchistan lying on the
flank of both Inner and Outer Mongolia."
Of scores of
books and papers one has to wade through as a
teacher and researcher, a few stay in the
mind’s eye. Harvard Professor William
Langer’s "Eurpoean Alliances &
Alignments" (1931), Cambridge’s A.J.P.
Taylor’s "Struggle for Mastery of
Europe" (1954), and the Indian
scholar-statesman, K.M. Panikkar’s
"Asia & Western Dominance" (1953).
For their scintillating prose, stimulating
analysis, deep insight. The temptation to
reproduce them is great but must, for obvious
reasons, be resisted.
Of recent books,
three come easily to mind. John Kenneth
Galbraith’s "A Life in Our Times"
(1981), Hsiao Kimura’s "Japanese Agent
in Tibet" (1990) and Vikram Seth’s
"From Heaven Lake" (1983).
Galbraith,
economist, diplomatist, and writer has two unique
assets. His interests and affections are not
inhibited by his discipline, much less his
country. Born a Canadian, he acquired American
citizenship and has lived and worked and
travelled in such diverse lands as India, Africa,
Latin America, China, Europe; as a Harvard don
for over three decades, he has taught at some of
the world’s most prestigious universities.
For a few
eventful years, he was US Ambassador to India.
His "Life" is a treat to read.
Hsiao Kimura is
an altogether different kettle of fish. His is a
tale of high adventure of a young 19-year-old
Japanese, disguised as Dawa Sangpo, a Mongol
Lama, who embarks on his travels through the vast
and empty heartland of Asia in the waning years
of World War II. His principal journey starts
(October, 1943) from an Inner Mongolian
Settlement and wends its way across the Alanshan
range and the Tengri desert, to Kumbum in
Qinghai.
Following a
15-month interlude of detention in the Tsaidam
basin, his progress towards Xinjiang is firmly
arrested. In the event, DS and his two Mongol
companions make their way to Lhasa instead from
the north via Nagchuka. And end up, in the autumn
of 1945, just about the time the war draws to a
close, in the busy, picturesque town of
Kalimpong.
Later (April,
1947), DS (Dawa Sangpo) joined another Japanese
acquaintance for an intelligence mission to
Chamdo, in Kham, to ascertain Chinese
preparations for the much-talked of assault on
Lhasa.
Both of
DS’s missions proved unqualified disasters.
By 1945, his first sponsors, the Japanese
military, had ceased to exist; by 1947, just as
he crossed into Kamlimpong to submit his report,
the Raj had wound up. No wonder his long-range
hope of the British eventually planting him on a
ranch in Inner Mongolia faded away fast. His last
two years in India (1947-49) occupied DS as a
trader (kerosene), smuggler (gold) and activist
(working out a constitution for Tibet). Trader
and smuggler, largely to make his little pile for
an eventual return home; an activist for
Tibet’s lost causes.
Through his
fascinating pages, the Japanese "agent"
comes through live as a keen, perceptive observer
and a brilliant raconteur. In his years of travel
as a Mongol lama, there were any number of
intriguing, even bizarre, situations. One such
was administering to the ailments of a young
Mongol girl who made no secret of her fascination
for the youthful Lama. Advances DS found
impossible to resist and almost succumbed.
Almost! Cursing no end his fake lamaist robes
which came in the way.
On another
occasion, he had an encounter with a genuine
Mongol lama much older to him in years. Even as
he was retiring after a day’s hard chores,
the old man reminded DS of his most important
work: chanting the holy texts. And a minute later
"with a wicked gleam in his eyes enquired:
‘Which way you like it, young fellow, from
the front or back?’"
Though a Mongol,
he had spent long years in Tibet and "could
go either way." With difficulty, DS wrested
himself by throwing the genuine lama against the
wall and running away into the wild.
Nearer home,
Kimura’s book reminds one strongly of Vikram
Seth’s "From Heaven Lake" with the
difference that its author wore no cloak to hide
his identity while his account of Tibet and of
Hsikang and Qinghai is powerfully evocative of
the mid-1980s. Vikram Seth’s was an
unbelievable hitch-hiking odyssey by a graduate
student of Stanford and Nanjing universities, the
more remarkable in that it was a solo
performance. All the way from the oases of
north-west China, across Xinjiang and Gansu in
the north-western desert, through the basin and
plateau of Qinghai — and finally Tibet.
Much of what
Vikram Seth was to write later "A Suitable
Boy" (1993), and "An Equal Music"
(1999) — is so transparently manifest in
these pages. Broad human sympathies; a keen,
observant eye for detail; a sharp, incisive mind.
Above all, his inimitable, fetching prose; short,
well-chiselled sentences which make for
fascinating, almost compelling reading.
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Three writers who moulded
many minds
by
V.N. Datta
THE vastness of human
knowledge fills us with awe and also despair.
Time and tide wait for none. Art is long and life
is short. Life piled on life is totally
insufficient to satiate our appetite for reading,
and we cannot do justice to even a small part of
literature.
 Due
to shortness of life which limits the pursuit of
interests that engage humankind, we have to
naturally pick and choose only a few books from
the large number published every year.
There are books
of various types: books of the hour and books of
all time. Books of the hour are like instant
coffee which interest us only for a little while
and slip out of mind; but books of all time mould
one’s outlook and character and leave an
indelible imprint on society. Such books are a
priceless treasure of mankind, that neither time
nor custom doth stale. They continue to radiate
sweetness and light, promote knowledge, deepen
understanding, and spread human sympathy.
There are all
sorts of books in my personal library, books of
an ephemeral kind which can be read in one
sitting and are just forgotten. But there are
books of eternal value to which often I turn such
as Edward Gibbon’s "Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire", Shakespeare’s works
including his sonnets, the Bhagavad Gita and
Dante’s "Divine Comedy". Such
books set our standard. Gibbon remains for me the
most favourite historian who helps me understand
the vicissitudes of human nature. Shakespeare I
can’t ignore — he triumphs over time,
and there is hardly an aspect of human life which
he doesn’t unravel with his penetrating
insight. The Bhagavad Gita unfolds the critical
human predicament, a dialectical question that
still exasperates us. Dante is the poet of great
depth.
Books come
one’s way by choice or design. As a
historian by profession, it is necessary for me
to study such books which not only help refining
and sharpening critical faculties in order to
wrestle with the past and reconstruct it in its
interlockings, but also to be well acquainted
with growing historical literature relating to my
field of enquiry and research. For one’s
field of specialisation, two types of books are
necessary; one, those relating to methodology
and, two, actual research monographs on common or
kindred themes.
From the point
of view of my professional interests, the book
that profoundly influenced my studies was Sir
Lewis Namier’s "Structure of Politics
at the Accession of George III" (second
edition, London, 1957). By focussing on the
working of the British Parliament during the
reign of George III, Namier shattered the
traditional view of the relations between the
Crown and Parliament at that time.
But it was
Namier’s path-breaking methodology that had
a decisive impact on the historiography of our
age. What Freud did for psychology, T.S. Eliot
for English poetry, Namier did for history.
Examining scores of collections of original
manuscripts, Namier analysed the evolution of
institutions by studying minutely the actions of
individuals.
To a serious
history researcher, I would recommend the first
chapter of Namier’s book titled "Why
men went into Parliament"? The sheer
brilliance of the methodology and precision of
thought and expression have stood the test of
time. "Here is an ant-heap, with the human
ants hurrying in long files, along their various
paths; their joint achievement does not concern
us nor the changes which supervene in the
community; only the pathetically intent,
seemingly self-conscious running of individuals
along beaten tracks." Namier studied these
types which are still with us in the topsy-turvy
world of politics, the types that live only for
the promotion of their mundane interests.
The Namier
method of historical interpretation underlines
the interplay of innumerable acts of innumerable
persons which has come to be known as
prosopography, the study of personalities —
which he applied to the study of 18th century
British politics. Addressing his friend Arnold
Toynbee, the famous historian, Namier said
"You try to look at the whole tree. I try to
dissect the tree’s texture, leaf by leaf.
Most of the others break off a branch and try to
cope with that. You and I agree in not favouring
that method."
The Namier
method has been adopted in the reconstruction of
political history all over the world. The most
striking feature of the method has been the
massiveness of its detailed research on a variety
of themes in which the main focus is on analysing
the motivating factors that operate in the
conduct of human action.
Imposing though
Namier’s achievement has been due to solid
scholarship, insight and brilliance of
interpretation, the Namier method has been
subjected to criticism. The chief criticism is
that Namier because of his emphasis on material
interest took his mind off history. His critics
argue that men do not support the government
merely because they enjoy office and its profits.
Promotion of interest and corruption are not the
only factors of parliamentary governance.
There are higher
ideals which inspire men to work for them. Life
is not merely a manipulation! Namier seems to
underestimate the role of ideas in the conduct of
human affairs. There are certainly political and
constitutional issues in which
"interests" are of little consideration
such as the emancipation of a country from the
fetters of foreign rule or issues of social and
economic justice.
***
The author who
has consistently fascinated me is Bertrand
Russell. His writings are not confined to the
advancement of science and philosophy. Like
Francis Bacon and Erasmus, he took all knowledge
to be his province. In his vast range of writings
Russell presents himself as a scientist,
mathematician, philosopher, educationist,
moralist, statesman, a great thinker in his own
right, a man of the world and a writer of
incomparable lucidity and style. He has
profoundly influenced contemporary intellectual
and moral life.
His writings
have been widely read and admired. There is a
stamp of greatness in them. When Russell’s
"History of Western Philosophy"
appeared in 1946, Einstein wrote, "I regard
it a fortune that so arid and brutal a generation
can claim this wise, honorable, honest man. It is
a work in the highest degree pedagogical which
stands outside the conflicts of parties and set
opinion."
Generally, I
distrust autobiographies, because they are
reconstructions in retrospect, and tend to
suppress which the author wants to hold back from
public gaze. That is why I doubt their veracity.
Of course, there are exceptions. John
Stuart Mill produced a remarkable autobiography
in which he portrayed his own intellectual
development step by step as a social and
political thinker.
Russell’s
father Lord Amberley was a disciple and friend of
John Stuart Mill. Mill was also Russell’s
godfather. Like Mill, Russell in his
autobiography published in three volumes,
1967-70, gives a blow-by blow account of his own
intellectual development. In fact, his
autobiography, a work of great importance, is the
intellectual and social portrait of his age.
Russell died at the ripe age of 94 widely
honoured and acclaimed as one of the most
creative minds of the 20th century.
Three passions
dominated Russell’s life: longing for love,
search for knowledge, and deep sympathy for the
suffering of mankind. In his prologue to his
autobiography, Russell wrote. "These
passions, like great winds, have blown me hither
and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep
ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of
despair?"
Love he sought
because it brought him ecstasy. He sought
knowledge to understand the world but pity
confronted him with the grim, sordid reality of
life. He dedicated his authobiography to his wife
Edith, and this deeply moving dedication is a
poetic summum bonum of his life.
Russell took to
learning like a duck takes to water. He read
voraciously. I think that like Lord Acton, he
read one book a day. His range of study was
astonishingly wide, his memory sharp, and his
retentive power extraordinary. He was not a
traditional bookworm relying on rote. He
assimilated what he read with his agility of mind
and grasp and meditated on it. All this led to
original thinking and deep analysis. It is a
difficult thing in life to find things for
oneself. Russell depended on himself entirely to
charter his own course and cultivated his garden
unobstrusively.
His
authobiography, a psychological revelation, shows
that he was a free thinker and a questioner of
things established. An agnostic, he stood his
ground fearlessly. When Oxford don Isaiah Berlin
asked him, "Lord Russell, what would you say
to God when you meet him?" Russel replied,
"I’ll tell him how imperfect he is when
the world he created was such a terrible
muddle." During World War I, being a
pacificist, he launched an anti-war campaign for
which he was arrested, and lost his prestigious
fellowship of Trinity College, Cambridge. His
friends deserted him, and he was isolated, but he
never faltered in his convictions.
Of immense value
in his autobiography is his correspondence with
some of the leading thinkers of the age —
philosophers Whitehead, Moore, and Bradley,
historian G.M. Trevelyan, the Webbs, Bernard
Shaw, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence,
J.M. Keynes, H.G. Wells, Einstein and countless
others. Some of the sentences in the
correspondence cry out to be quoted and deal with
matters of general interest which are relevant
even today.
His pupils
testify to the tremendous influence he had on
them by his teaching. In their letter of April
11, 1940, while commenting on the general effect
of Russell’s teaching, they wrote that his
object was "to sharpen the student’s
sense of truth both by developing his desire for
truth and by leaving him to a more rigorous
application of the test of truth"
("Autobiography", Vol, II, page 229).
A number of
women came into Russell’s life, and he
developed intimate relationship with them, about
which he has written with absolute, candour.
Russel was not a man of weak morals. Some of the
women stirred his creative work and evoked a
sense of exaltation; and he felt a deep
exhilaration in those shared moments.
One of the
finest and deeply moving passages in the
autobiography relates to Russell’s intense
feeling for the ailing Mrs Whitehead. The ground
seemed to give way under him. Russell writes,
"Within five minutes I went through some
such reflections as the following: the loneliness
of the human soul is unendurable, nothing can
penetrate it except the highest intensity of the
sort of love that religious teachers have
preached — a sort of mystic illumination
possessed me. I found myself filled with
semi-mystical feeling — with an intense
interest in children and with a desire almost as
profound as that of the Buddha to find some
philosophy which should make life endurable"
("Authobiography", Vol I, page 146).
Russell’s
"Autobiogoraphy" is an astounding
performance of a meticulously honest thinker and
genius who lived his life in pursuit of truth and
reality and gave a tremendous impulse to thought
for all time to come.
***
Lin Yutang,
known for his nimble wit and puckish humour,
wrote that a person who has no taste for poetry
is not a civilised human being. In our younger
days Tagore and Mohammed Iqbal were the most
popular poets. In Punjab, there was a sizeable
Urdu knowing elite that read Ghalib and Iqbal. I
preferred Iqbal to Ghalib because the latter I
thought was rather pessimistic. Ghalib was
essentially a great poet of sorrow, the last sigh
of the Mughal twilight.
Iqbal sang of
the ego, free will and the vital (khudi). Iqbal
exhorted us to fortify our personalities by
holding our heads high and keeping the spirit
unbent. His "Bal-e-Jabrail", a
collection of poems on a variety of themes, made
a powerful impression on youth. There was no
place for cowardice — the battle must
continue and we must not falter in our
resolution. These poems present Iqbal as a
positive thinker deeply committed to finding a
way to a new affirmation and enrichment of life.
He returns to this theme repeatedly, approaching
it from different angles.
In his poetry
packed with powerful rhetoric and imagery, Iqbal
projects vividly a Faustian vision of unyielding
and unlimited power, the new vision of Man, the
adventurous and explorer on an endless quest for
perfection. The ideal man for Iqbal was the monim,
the superman who discovers his own path and
to whom will is more important than
understanding, and character far more decisive
than the riches of mind.
Iqbal’s
style is both didactic and contemplative, and the
reader must accept him or reject him. In his
poetry there was no hiatus between his
personality and his themes. He had no predecessor
or successor. He was a class by himself, who
shone bright like a solitary star on the
firmament.
Though I
disagree with him on many things, I remain
constantly in touch with his Persian and Urdu
verses which are a source of great inspiration
and strength in the battle of life.
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Trade in illusions and kill
ideals
by
Bhupinder Brar
ERIC Hobsbawm begins his
engaging account of the 20th century "The
Age of Extremes" by quoting among others
Yehudi Menuhin, eminent musician. "If I had
to sum up the twentieth century," says
Menuhin, "I would say that it raised the
greatest hopes ever conceived by humanity, and
destroyed all illusions and ideals."
Hopes indeed
marked newly independent India in the 1950s, the
decade in which I was born, and hopes of global
emancipation marked the radicalism of the 1960s,
the years in which I grew up.
As the century
comes to a close, there is widespread feeling,
which I share in my mid-life, that a good deal
stands destroyed. What I am still in the process
of deciding, however, is which part of the wreck
are ideals and which part the illusions. To which
category, for example, does the collapse of the
Soviet-style socialism belong?
Read Francis
Fukuyama’s book "End of History"
for a ready and unambiguous answer. To him the
demise of the USSR means the end of the greatest,
and the most dangerous, illusion: socialism. To
me, too, the demise means the end of an illusion,
but of a very different kind: the illusion that
the Soviet Union embodied, even in its heyday,
the ideal that socialism was, and is.
My reading
involves going back to two writings I consider
most seminal. Both were published as books
although neither was meant to be. The first, Karl
Marx’s "Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts" (EPM) was written in 1844 but
was discovered and published first in the
original German in 1932 and in an English
translation only in 1959. The second, Antonio
Gramsci’s "Prison Notebooks", was
written in the late 1920s but the English
translation became available only in 1971.
"EPM"
presented a critique of capitalism, and a vision
of socialism, which remain not only valid but
have become even more relevant after the collapse
of the Soviet bloc and the consequent universal
sway of capitalism. The primary critique of
capitalism in "EPM" was not that it was
based on economic exploitation of the real
creators of wealth, the working class, or that
capitalism as an economic system was inherently
moribund, ridden as it was with irresolvable
internal contradictions. The primary critique was
that capitalism was dehumanising for all.
The unique
character of human species, which distinguished
it from all other animals, was that humans were
creative: they did not have to adapt themselves
to environment given to them; they could create
the environment, both material and cultural, of
their choice. It is in creating this environment
that they found fulfilment and happiness.
Under
capitalism, Marx argued, large majorities of
creative, and potentially creative, people were
denied independent access to the material means
which they required to realise and express their
creativity. Capitalism imposed impersonal and
arbitrary conditions of work, which left humans
dissatisfied and frustrated. It alienated them
from their own creativity and from other creative
fellow beings.
The soundness of
a socio-economic system, Marx said, had to be
measured not in terms indices of economic wealth
and growth, not in terms of ever rising levels of
possession and consumption of material goods. It
had to be measured in terms of opportunities it
provided to human beings to explore their inner
creative selves, to express themselves freely,
spontaneously and creatively. All this, Marx
believed, was possible not under conditions of
capitalism but socialism.
Did the
Soviet-style "socialism" provide such
opportunities and freedom to the people? It is
true that it removed many obstacles such as
unemployment, illiteracy and ill-health. This was
a remarkable achievement in itself, but the costs
were very heavy. The means adopted aborted the
desired end.
Excessive
political and economic centralisation, indeed
regimentation, resulting in authoritarianism and
bureaucratisation, killed the creative potential
of the people even while their material
conditions improved.
This led many to
argue, most noteworthy among them Charles
Bettleheim, that capitalism of a kind, state
capitalism, had been restored in these countries.
It may not be exploitative like the conventional
forms of capitalism, but it was equally
dehumanising.
The argument may
be exaggerated but is well taken if we go by how
Marx distinguished socialism from capitalism. The
point here would be that even if the Soviet-style
states had not only survived but also thrived as
great economic and military powers, their
achievements would have been recognised by Marx
for their efficient "model of economic
development" but not lauded for their record
of establishing socialism.
Similarly, Marx
would have noted that capitalism had found not
only ways of managing its contradictions but also
of spreading its sweep to newer and newer
territories, but he would have still seen it as a
negative, inhuman and dehumanising system which
it undoubtedly remains to a large majority of
people in the Third World as also in pockets of
deprivation and discrimination in the First
World.
Why is it, then,
one may ask, that despite all this, capitalism is
being embraced by an increasing number of regimes
in the Third World? One easy answer to this
question lies in the character of the industrial
and business classes in these countries. Rather
than opposing the neocolonial form of capitalism
as some of them did for some time, they have all
turned collaborators of foreign capital. Even if
true, this answer begs another question: why have
they, all of a sudden and all at once, done so?
To this latter question, there are no easy
answers.
This is where
the second seminal writing, Gramsci’s
"Prison Notebooks" might provide an
answer, or at least a clue. The "Prison
Notebooks" offers several invaluable
insights, but the most important, as also the
most relevant for the present purpose, is his
notion of hegemony and hegemonic ideas. Some
ideas, he argues, can under certain circumstances
transcend the immediate context of their origin
and validation and cut across class and
territorial boundaries.
This happens
because they are able to appear as universally
true, an objectively drawn picture of the
existing socio-political reality or else as
universally applicable moral, cultural and
political values with which to change the
existing reality. In other words hegemony meant
uncritical internalisation of ideas borrowed from
an alien context.
Gramsci used
this understanding to explain why the exploited
classes of industrial workers or poor and
landless peasants did not rise in revolt against
their exploiters. I believe that it can explain
two more things to us. First, it can explain to
us why the Soviet-style "socialism"
appeared as genuine socialism to vast sections of
leftwing parties, movements, groups and
individuals across the globe. That is because
Soviet ideas about socialism became hegemonic.
And that is why
when the Soviet-style states collapsed, not only
were the detractors of socialism mighty pleased
but, barring a few exceptions, the Left also
stood dismayed, disarmed, defeated. The collapse
of an illusion became equated with the defeat of
an ideal.
Second,
Gramsci’s notion of hegemony makes us aware
of the importance of what ideologues like
Fukuyama do. By talking of the "End of
History", Fukuyama is trying to establish
capitalism as the universally applicable and
valuable system for all times to come. He is, in
other words, trying to establish the hegemony of
capitalism.
For all we know,
he is quite wrong, but for all we know, he has
quite succeeded in his purpose. Hegemonic ideas,
after all, do not have to be true ideas. They
can, if they become hegemonic, replace
hard-to-achieve ideals with easy-to-entertain
illusions.
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Oh, all the sentimental
stuff!
by
Manju Jaidka
"WHAT can you say about a
twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was
beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart
and Bach. And the Beatles. And me."
Thus began a
cult-making book of the seventies which carried
the message, "Love means never having to say
you’re sorry!" The most coveted of all
gifts one could receive, this was a book that had
the young and old alike swearing by it.
Today Erich
Segal’s "Love Story" may be
half-remembered, misplaced somewhere in the dusty
attics of memory, but time was when everyone,
just about everyone who was anyone, was talking
about it. And when it was made into a film with
Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw in the stellar
roles, with that unforgettable, haunting music,
"Where do I begin the story of how fateful
love can be…" it was almost unbearable!
Consciously or unconsciously it permeated deep,
deep into the recesses of the mind and remained
there. Simply remained there. For keeps!
Books like this
one mould you into what you are. They enter your
system and become part of you. You read and
appreciate them not because contemporary literary
taste tells you to do so but because you take
them up with no pretensions and they strike a
responsive chord somewhere within, reminding you
of the immense power and glory of life; of the
trials, the sorrows and the ephemeral joys that
we ordinary mortals must encounter as we plod
through this temporal terrain; of the fact that
we are all co-passengers, not one more special
than the other, fellow human beings who must
remain humble in the face of a quirky, whimsical
destiny.
But let me pause
a moment and ask you a question: suppose you are
faced with an innocuous query like "What are
the books that have influenced you the
most?" Is it not tempting to hold forth for
the rest of the day on all the literary classics
of the world? On all the thick, dull,
uninteresting books that have rarely been read
from cover to cover but have won all the
prestigious awards. On the ideologically and
politically correct writing that one, as a
so-called intellectually aware social animal, is
—or at least ought to be — familiar
with.
Oh yes,
you’d love to talk about it for, let’s
face it, it may be a long while before you get
another chance to impress your listeners with
your cleverness or the wide range of your reading
interests or your name-dropping familiarity with
all those literary landmarks.
Sure, you’d
talk about something like "Demonic
Verses" which everyone is supposed to have
heard of; or of "A Suitable Catch"
— yes, yes, you have seen the book; or of
"Hullaballoo in the Country Churchyard"
which, even if you haven’t read it, why, you
know all about it, you’ve read reviews of it
and it is the "in" thing to talk about
it, so why not? You’d pontificate on the
merits and demerits of the writer’s
technique, try and pin a label on him/her, and
leave your listeners gasping for breath, all of
them suitably impressed!
Or perhaps
you’d talk about something safer, something
less controversial. "My Experiments with
Truth" which your dad, with the best of
intentions, was always trying to hammer into your
unreceptive mind when you were barely into your
teens. Or Lin Yutang. Or Dayanand Saraswati.
In your most
personal moments, however, when you are face to
face with yourself, when you’ve dropped all
those social masks you’re forced to wear for
the sake of survival, why not take the question
up again, this time honestly? What are the books
that have "influenced" you the most? As
an adult today you can no longer be influenced
for you are no longer malleable. You can’t
even pretend to be influenced and if you do,
there’s got to be something wrong, something
very wrong somewhere!
If you’re
familiar with the poetry of William Blake,
you’d probably know what I’m talking
about when I say that once we step out of the
innocent green, we enter shades of grey —
the grey of experience when the prison house of
the world closes in around us, cutting us off
from divinity that we were once part of. From
innocence we step into knowledge and, need I
repeat, after such knowledge what forgiveness?
You no longer respond with your heart but with
your mind. And the mind is one that has become
tough with worldly ways.
So, as hardened,
calloused adults caught up in the rat race of the
world, can we really be moulded or moved or
touched or influenced by a book? I really
don’t think so!
Speaking for
myself, what were the books that stayed long with
me, apart from "Love Story"? Honestly,
I don’t even remember. But some titles stand
out. Some lines echo in the memory. For instance:
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay
again. It seemed to me that I stood by the iron
gate leading to the drive, and for a while I
could not enter for the way was barred to
me..." from "Rebecca". Again, you
wrinkle up your nose and dismiss it as popular
stuff that adolescence feeds on!
But, as the bard
said, such is the stuff that dreams are made of.
And in dreams begin responsibilities. Manderlay,
with its swirling fog, its misty landscape of sea
and sky and rock, its characters caught up in a
nexus of love and hate, fear and suspicion, looms
large as a landmark from the past, a relic from
an age when impressions could still be formed.
Then came that
book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry which I had to
buy again and again: "The Little
Prince", translated from the French. I had
to buy it repeatedly because I couldn’t
resist showing it to all the folks I became fond
of. They would borrow it, cry over it, wish to
keep it, and that would be the last I’d see
of my copy. A child’s fable for adults, this
is how it is generally described. The copies I
bought were all illustrated ones, showing the
Little Prince and the Star, the journeys through
different worlds, the lump-in-the-throat ending
with the reminder that the best things in life
are still the simplest ones and that real wealth
is giving to others.
These were all raste-ke-patthar,
milestones of those years gone by. But perhaps
the one that stayed with me the longest was a
popular version of a book that came out exactly
100 years ago, in 1900: Sigmund Freud’s
"Interpretation of Dreams". Yes, I did
read the original – that dog-eared, yellowed
copy that I found rummaging in my dad’s
cupboard.
But what I
enjoyed even more was the hardbound,
green-covered "The Dreamer’s
Dictionary", a spin-off from Freud that I
discovered one serendipitous moment on the
reference shelves of the library. This
"Dreamer’s Dictionary" became my
Bible, not for a day or two, nor for a brief
spell, but for years altogether. I couldn’t
borrow the book, so I trooped to the library
every day, the previous night’s dream
hastily scribbled in my diary sometime in the
early hours of the morning, in a half-somnolent
state.
The noisy years
go rushing past and milestones get left behind.
New cult-makers repeat the age-old message in
different words: Love is just for one time and
lasts for a life time…. You grow and you
move on. Life brings many surprises that take you
away from those long leisurely days filled with
books. Those early companions, "Atlas
Shrugged", "How Green Was My
Valley", "The Lost Horizon", and
other such books once surreptitiously sneaked
into the classroom lie in unobtrusive corners,
gathering dust. Were someone to ask me today of
the best books I’ve read, I’d probably
draw myself up to my full height, put on my
superior-than-thou expression, and rattle off
big-sounding names: the works of James Joyce or
T.S. Eliot or Salman Rushdie or other writers
that I (being a teacher) must read for
bread-and-butter reasons. No, I would probably
not mention "Rebecca" or "The
Little Prince" or "The Dreamer’s
Dictionary" or even "Love Story".
Especially not "Love Story" for fear of
being labelled a sentimental slob!
It is so much
easier to wear the mask of a hardened criminal
who never had any fanciful dreams. Who
didn’t know the meaning of caring. Of human
bondage. Or nostalgia. Or love!
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