I have been delaying this writing for quite sometime. Often for its structure, that somehow contradicts its theme. And for the theme that seems far too obvious to me. These thoughts and reasons appear even before a third of my writing happens, and I abort the scribble for the nth time. On my bed then, with a book titled ‘Clandestine in Chile’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A one-go reading of its 102 pages and I am up on my feet again, to the table. The pen waits to be picked up and a paper yields its blankness.
I want to write about the issue of languages. An issue, which has been paid less attention to, by most prevailing approaches to academics. I say so because, hardly any academic writing seems to register itself in my mind for long, and the little it does, doesn’t serve its purpose too good. The essential purpose of communicating its essence is materialized by creating an amalgam of extensive information and confusing contexts in my mind. And in practice I abandon the reading either with a sense of awe or a nonchalance with which I see a printed Levi carry bag. It becomes rather stifling to continue reading the research analysis on International relations or an academic report on the tribes of Central India.
I sleep in my room.
And wake up in Chile, with Miguel Littin, the exiled filmmaker, who risked his freedom to bring the world a truer picture of life under General Augusto Pinochet. That was what the book was all about. A chronicle of Littin’s underground adventure through which Pinochet’s Chile pictures before the reader. I begin knowing the landscape of Chile, her people, their expressions, and by the end of the book, meander through the streets of Santiago, identifying the Mapocho bridges, San Cristobal hill, Forestal park, and the Moneda Palace where the general dictates his country from. Garcia Marquez acts as Litten’s ghost in the book and contrives to represent and dramatize the heroic resistance of countless Chileans through that dictatorial regime of Pinochet.
In other words the writing registers. Indelibly.
What is it then that misses out in the academic writings. The report fails to assimilate me with the tribal culture of central India although I am almost a part of it.
The manner in which a text is written, a thought is thought, a speech is uttered is integral to its content. And the academic lingo neglects this integrity. Probably this non-indulgence in form and over indulgence in the subject changes its flavor. Words are treated as mere tools to represent factual events, events that have qualities of their own, independent of how we perceive them through human eyes and human speech.
For example the turbulent events of the recent Iraq war can be understood through the vocabulary of high politics, which revolves around great power relations and diplomatic negotiations; or through the vocabulary of strategic studies, which stresses military capacities, state repression, and relations of coercive force; or through the vocabulary of international political economy, which places emphasis on market performances and their impact on world order. In all these cases, the theorist sincerely tries to embody the real facts in his/her writing. One major thing, which gets left unattended, is that that what winds up finally on a sheet of paper are words, and words need to be consciously juxtaposed to mean what one wants to mean. In other words, the academician needs to allow the subjectivity of fiction to disturb the stable perceptions of the real. He/She has to couple an analytical acumen with imagination. And simultaneously has to strike a balance between information and poetry. I believe this could stretch the dissemination of any academic research to the common fry.
As I take a break from the hazardous shooting stints of Litten in Chile, I sight my grandmother, dissolved in a bland winter sun with one of her many religious scriptures. She reads them mechanically, in short mumbles, interrupted by a look she spares on every passing vehicle on the street, and then back again to flip the page. It’s as if she transcends to a different spatio-temporal frame, the Satayuga, with Lord Rama, Sita, Lakshmana…much in semblance to my times in Chile, an hour ago. What Marquez does for me, Tulsi offers her.
An offer of poetry. Poetry, which allows the reader to read as well as create. To the contrary a journalistic report, or an academic paper mostly serves as a claustrophobic sphere in which the reader is not spared a chance to explore.
For example; The seventy-sixth page of volume three of the report on tribes of central India offers the latest database of the infant mortality rates among Pahadi Korwa, a tribe threatened with demographic extinction. In the dissertation of a thesis on international market, a researcher draws up the role of developing countries. A newspaper report on the debacle of the Congress(I) in the recent assembly elections, abstrusely reasons the rise of the saffron in Chhattisgarh.
Pahadi Korwas, developing countries, or the assembly elections, very much exist in the same world which I do, and so does the author of their respective articles.
But the writing in general acutely fails to assimilate me in it’s content. It doesn’t take my grandma to Satayuga and my trip to Chile evaporates. The real happenings documented in these writings attain a prosaically fictitious territory. A domain which lacks an offer of poetry.
Thus I feel, a better rethinking and execution of academic and journalistic endeavors must engage the issue of linguistic representations. Poetry perhaps is ideally suited for such an endeavor because it revolves around a recognition that the aesthetic is inseparable from the substance. It engages the links between language and sociopolitical reality, in a manner which is comprehensible to a casual reader, and equally discursive for a scholar.
I am not sure if I have made my point clear. An example would elucidate it more. The back flap of the book I read on Chile has a red bold punchline which reads…On 28 November 1986, in Valparaiso, the Chilean authorities impounded and burned 15,000 copies of this book…
That tells something of the impact of this book. Journalism and academic writings can very well create such an impact. Perhaps only when the authors live in their writings and weave a passion which breathes through their words.
As I end this piece I tend to remember the line I started with…the structure which contradicts its theme…
I have tried to justify the engagement of linguistic habits in journalistic and academic writings and in that process I feel , I have barely produced a confusing mesh of my ideas.
Tough marriage…of the fact and the fancy. But auteurs like Garcia Marquez, or Tulsidas, make it look so easy. I learn from that. Maybe Journalism, and academics takes a lesson or two.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
a sky red
RAINS AND DESTINY
A sky red…
..at times far from then, I reminisced those thirteen days of demented passion for rituals, mixing up events, re-constructing a chronology, while Comrade my soul as we called each other mutually, read aloud lines in a diary, as old as his first visit to my place, almost the age of his love, lying in a bliss of amnesia till he touched a page where pains of her going away shrouded in mysterious forms of absence.
Forgetting her
After her
Is like a suffering
Asleep
In a chink between
Not finding her after returning home
And not searching her after not finding
Comrade’s gaze was fixed on the wall as he picked these lines. He had invented a habit of understanding the walls, as flakes of quicklime scraped off from it. And beyond the walls were gods. Gods of different kinds whistled boons, as mother arrived mounted on a bamboo chair. They looked at her. So did I. Painfully. I remember her frail limbs, ones that had slowly refused to work, a receding hairlines, and eyes so placid, they simply didn’t want to see anymore, all within an year of torturous ailment. The pundit awaited her, with a holy pyre ignited before him, Maha Mrutunjaya Jap it was, designed profusely to bereave death of its timeless possessions. My mother was one of them. No one ever heard what did she say in that festival of her death. People were all so busy, medically and spiritually conserving her existence on a bed with numerous pillows arranged to bate the pain. ‘this one this side’ she would say and briskly a pair of hands would move it to her wish. How easy it was to die, she explained through those placid eyes and a voice reduced to a groan. Malignant cells grow in a progression of squares. I imagined, her stomach billowing of tumors and bursting into an amalgam of red and yellow, with so much death stippled in it like cells. At a distance father talked to my aunt, a doctor by profession, a saint by practice. ‘we’ll have a fortwin’ she buzzed. Father nodded. Mother watched them silently. The morning after she had to die. She knew it perhaps, cause she talked at length, and that my father a one sided deaf could make out her speech candidly.
Death teaches intimately, I heard him remark, Comrade had understood another wall, leaning by a pillow where
Her being
In her death
Was always forgotten
And thus broke a dawn belligerent under a sun almost red, ten years after she ceased. What does the death of a woman, one’s wife and another’s mother, who served the Government mean? Nobody asked. It meant 58signatures of the husband and 23 of the son, alongwith LHF, left hand finger impressions duly attested by a gazetted officer, or a respectable person of the same area , send by registered post in triplicate copies attached to form no. X,Y, Z, of P,Q,R ministry, addressed to Mr. L,M,N, principal of U,V,W, college: where the person deceased served before he/she started existing like a void amidst a flood of people, R,S,T, who claimed to love her, care her, know her, feel her, but never talk of her, in a decade after her death.
‘obselete’ my father commented, in aversion of the country’s bureaucracy. The authorities had beleaguered him enough to obtain his wife’s death gratuity and provisional pension. Forms came as pamphlets in an ad-campaign of a new product being launched, followed by reminders and more reminders. Those sick brown envelopes containing of six to eight pages of awfully typed literature , the crux of which more abstract than a sky almost red.
‘fill it up neatly, and more importantly fill it up today’ lest we don’t run short of time, and a week later another brown envelope arrives with yet more abstraction. I was burning in a mid June heat dripping visibly in shafts of yellow from the roof , the wall, the window besides which I usually sat and constructed words on a black woman’s back, till I heard the instructions, belabored thoroughly through a timid old man’s mouth.
‘his pressure is up’ bedu pinched my elbow. Pinto da returned from the bath. We three were supposed to receive Guddu at the station. He was coming after an year. His arrival meant hard cash soaked in a week of hard booze , culminating in a hard truth of bankruptcy, when he returned back, on money borrowed from me, sought from my father, an old man , thrust upon the racks of red tapism, struggling like a galley slave, to get bequeathed of the death gratuity and provisional pension of a wife , so dear evaporating from his world like vapors of helplessness, into a sky almost red.
A sky red…
..at times far from then, I reminisced those thirteen days of demented passion for rituals, mixing up events, re-constructing a chronology, while Comrade my soul as we called each other mutually, read aloud lines in a diary, as old as his first visit to my place, almost the age of his love, lying in a bliss of amnesia till he touched a page where pains of her going away shrouded in mysterious forms of absence.
Forgetting her
After her
Is like a suffering
Asleep
In a chink between
Not finding her after returning home
And not searching her after not finding
Comrade’s gaze was fixed on the wall as he picked these lines. He had invented a habit of understanding the walls, as flakes of quicklime scraped off from it. And beyond the walls were gods. Gods of different kinds whistled boons, as mother arrived mounted on a bamboo chair. They looked at her. So did I. Painfully. I remember her frail limbs, ones that had slowly refused to work, a receding hairlines, and eyes so placid, they simply didn’t want to see anymore, all within an year of torturous ailment. The pundit awaited her, with a holy pyre ignited before him, Maha Mrutunjaya Jap it was, designed profusely to bereave death of its timeless possessions. My mother was one of them. No one ever heard what did she say in that festival of her death. People were all so busy, medically and spiritually conserving her existence on a bed with numerous pillows arranged to bate the pain. ‘this one this side’ she would say and briskly a pair of hands would move it to her wish. How easy it was to die, she explained through those placid eyes and a voice reduced to a groan. Malignant cells grow in a progression of squares. I imagined, her stomach billowing of tumors and bursting into an amalgam of red and yellow, with so much death stippled in it like cells. At a distance father talked to my aunt, a doctor by profession, a saint by practice. ‘we’ll have a fortwin’ she buzzed. Father nodded. Mother watched them silently. The morning after she had to die. She knew it perhaps, cause she talked at length, and that my father a one sided deaf could make out her speech candidly.
Death teaches intimately, I heard him remark, Comrade had understood another wall, leaning by a pillow where
Her being
In her death
Was always forgotten
And thus broke a dawn belligerent under a sun almost red, ten years after she ceased. What does the death of a woman, one’s wife and another’s mother, who served the Government mean? Nobody asked. It meant 58signatures of the husband and 23 of the son, alongwith LHF, left hand finger impressions duly attested by a gazetted officer, or a respectable person of the same area , send by registered post in triplicate copies attached to form no. X,Y, Z, of P,Q,R ministry, addressed to Mr. L,M,N, principal of U,V,W, college: where the person deceased served before he/she started existing like a void amidst a flood of people, R,S,T, who claimed to love her, care her, know her, feel her, but never talk of her, in a decade after her death.
‘obselete’ my father commented, in aversion of the country’s bureaucracy. The authorities had beleaguered him enough to obtain his wife’s death gratuity and provisional pension. Forms came as pamphlets in an ad-campaign of a new product being launched, followed by reminders and more reminders. Those sick brown envelopes containing of six to eight pages of awfully typed literature , the crux of which more abstract than a sky almost red.
‘fill it up neatly, and more importantly fill it up today’ lest we don’t run short of time, and a week later another brown envelope arrives with yet more abstraction. I was burning in a mid June heat dripping visibly in shafts of yellow from the roof , the wall, the window besides which I usually sat and constructed words on a black woman’s back, till I heard the instructions, belabored thoroughly through a timid old man’s mouth.
‘his pressure is up’ bedu pinched my elbow. Pinto da returned from the bath. We three were supposed to receive Guddu at the station. He was coming after an year. His arrival meant hard cash soaked in a week of hard booze , culminating in a hard truth of bankruptcy, when he returned back, on money borrowed from me, sought from my father, an old man , thrust upon the racks of red tapism, struggling like a galley slave, to get bequeathed of the death gratuity and provisional pension of a wife , so dear evaporating from his world like vapors of helplessness, into a sky almost red.
Monday, August 15, 2005
bony kosaya
BONY KOSAYA is an attempt to feel the revels of an eternal festival...LIFEThrough the portrayal of three common persons, Mastu, Radhe, and Juaadu, their times as a barber, panwallah, and rickshawpuller respectively, it aims to documenttheir bonds with Art...an Art of Existence.
A trailer will shortly be available for download
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