Language

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.