Shunya's Notes

'Storytellers' by Mo Yan

An endearing Nobel Lecture by Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012. Yan talks about his mother, his childhood, the town he spent his first 21 years in, the sources of his inspiration, his penchant for basing his characters on people around him, and more.

I was born ugly. Villagers often laughed in my face, and school bullies sometimes beat me up because of it. I’d run home crying, where my mother would say, “You’re not ugly, Son. You’ve got a nose and two eyes, and there’s nothing wrong with your arms and legs, so how could you be ugly? If you have a good heart and always do the right thing, what is considered ugly becomes beautiful.” Later on, when I moved to the city, there were educated people who laughed at me behind my back, some even to my face; but when I recalled what Mother had said, I just calmly offered my apologies.

My illiterate mother held people who could read in high regard. We were so poor we often did not know where our next meal was coming from, yet she never denied my request to buy a book or something to write with. By nature hard working, she had no use for lazy children, yet I could skip my chores as long as I had my nose in a book.

A storyteller once came to the marketplace, and I sneaked off to listen to him. She was unhappy with me for forgetting my chores. But that night, while she was stitching padded clothes for us under the weak light of a kerosene lamp, I couldn’t keep from retelling stories I’d heard that day. She listened impatiently at first, since in her eyes professional storytellers were smooth-talking men in a dubious profession. Nothing good ever came out of their mouths. But slowly she was dragged into my retold stories, and from that day on, she never gave me chores on market day, unspoken permission to go to the marketplace and listen to new stories. As repayment for Mother’s kindness and a way to demonstrate my memory, I’d retell the stories for her in vivid detail.

A controversy recently arose over Mo Yan's selection for the Prize, in which Salman Rushdie criticized Yan's political affiliations and was ably defended by Pankaj Mishra. See the entertaining public exchanges between these two one, two, three, and four.

Sex & Style in Murakami's 1Q84, A Review — Part 2

By R Alexander

This is part 2 of 2 of a review of Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84. You can link to the first part here.

Structurally, non-realist narratives are no different from more standard “realistic” fictions. They create a narrative tension, often involving some sort of conflict, and then they resolve that tension in some way. What I’m addressing here is narrative structure, and what I’ve posited sounds simplistic, I suppose. Even if a story is non-realistic (as in, say, magical realism, surrealist fiction, slip stream stories, science fiction or fantasy, fabulist pieces, and whatever else), there is some sort of hook or some way that the reader can relate to what’s going on, and there is narrative tension built on conflict. In addition to this, stories provide a sense of closure, at or near their end. Non-realist stories tend to play with the conventions of these two aspects of story and to make that play an explicit part of the narrative. Kafka, for instance, tells the story of a person who turns into a bug. That story takes as its starting place an event that is impossible and also horrific. We can become involved in this story though, not because we are interested in entomology, but because we recognize something human in the situation. Sympathetic readers of the story will recognize that it is about, among other things, alienation, about the creaturely nature of our nature, and about family. So the story involves us in a very straightforward way. And the story has a very straightforward sense of closure at the end. The story ends with Gregor Samsa’s death and with changes that occur among the family because of it.

Writers of whatever stripe engage their readers in diverse ways. Gabriel Garcia Marquez' works, the sine qua non of "magic realism," plunge into family, history, and culture, into the relations of people among themselves and their struggle to achieve relationships or the way those familial, historical, and cultural relationships become entangled and complicated and fulfilled or frustrated. The dream-like fleetingness of Garcia Marquez’ style is itself part of what he is saying about the nature of those relationships. Likewise Salman Rushdie’s picaresque style enacts part of the argument he is making about the accidental sometimes indecent or inhumane shape human lives can be twisted into by historical and/or cultural forces. Samuel Beckett's pieces are musings on language, memory, and identity, and his works are like the mind at play. Borges is the master, invoking mirrors and libraries and labyrinths, and thereby taking up notions of perception, of quantum realities and the forking nature of time and causality, and of notions of historicity and knowledge. 

Curator of a Hollowed Conscience

Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal on the great short story writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, whose birth centenary was celebrated this year.

Saadat Hasan Manto ... once remarked that any attempt to fathom the murderous hatred that erupted with such devastating effect at the time of the British retreat from the subcontinent had to begin with an exploration of human nature itself.

For the master of the Urdu short story this was not a value judgment. It was a statement of what he had come to believe after keen observation and extended introspection. Shaken by the repercussions of the decision to break up the unity of the subcontinent, Manto wondered if people who only recently were friends, neighbours and compatriots had lost all sense of their humanity. He too was a human being, ‘the same human being who raped mankind, who indulged in killing' and had ‘all those weaknesses and qualities that other human beings have.' Yet human depravity, however pervasive and deplorable, could not kill all sense of humanity. With faith in that kind of humanity, Manto wrote riveting short stories about the human tragedy of 1947 that are internationally acknowledged for representing the plight of displaced and terrorised humanity with exemplary impartiality and empathy.

More here.

Style & Plot in Murakami's 1Q84, A Review — Part 1

By R Alexander

Haruki Murakami writes short stories and big novels where weird things take on strange importance:  a disappearing cat leads to a detective type adventure, ears are erotic, jazz and classical music beckons and have magically transformative properties, abandoned wells harbor mysteries. Metaphysics as meaning seems to loom over his work. With each book he writes and as the books get longer, greater and greater claims are made concerning their importance. His latest work, 1Q84, is being called his magnum opus, and a great work of world literature. The book is so long, in fact, that Random House hired two translators, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, to work on it simultaneously so they could get it to press in a reasonable time. 

1Q84 mainly concerns two people living in Tokyo in 1984 who, early in the novel, find themselves in a parallel or alternate universe. The novel’s title refers to one of the character's name for the alternate universe.  The “Q,” in 1Q84, stands for "question,” and there is apparently a sonic play on “Q” and “9” in the original Japanese, similar, I suppose to the orthographic play on or resemblance between the figures for “q” and “9” in English. 

Aside from this little play on “Q” and “9” in the title, however, Murakami’s prose style remains straightforwardly realistic. No GV Desani-style linguistic or cultural tom-foolery here. Murakami is well known for being the Japanese translator of Raymond Carver and F Scott Fitzgerald, and these influences, Carver’s in particular, are not hidden. In1Q84, Murakami does not depart from his characteristic style and themes. 

1Q84’s two protagonists are Tengo Kawana and Aomame. Tengo, a math teacher and would-be fiction writer, crosses paths with the assassin Aomame, during an investigation into a religious cult. The story’s action takes off when Tengo collaborates with a former cult member, a character called Fuka-Eri, in writing a novella that exposes the cult’s sexual rituals which involve paedophilia. The name of the novella is Air Chrysalis, and much of 1Q84 involves the collaborative writing of Air Chrysalis and the cult’s subsequent hunt for Tengo and Fuka-Eri and later also the hunt  for Aomame, who assassinates the cult leader and goes into hiding separately. But this hardly gives the real sense of the work. While the plot generally follows the outline of a straightforward thriller, Murakami’s baroque inventiveness twists the story into the bizarre. It is not simply that the book is set in a world that has two moons in the sky, where Japan has become a kind of police state, and where other “mirror universe” trappings appear, but there are the weird things that happen. The religious cult, for example, is based around a charismatic leader and his connection to “The Little People,” a troop of vaguely menacing Leprechaun-like entities who emerge, the first time we see them, from a dead dog’s mouth and who manipulate people and events.

Joseph Anton, a Memoir by Rushdie

Salman Rushdie has written an autobiography in the third person. This New Yorker excerpt describes how his life changed after the fatwa:

Afterward, when the world was exploding around him, he felt annoyed with himself for having forgotten the name of the BBC reporter who told him that his old life was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin. She called him at home, on his private line, without explaining how she got the number. “How does it feel,” she asked him, “to know that you have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?” It was a sunny Tuesday in London, but the question shut out the light. This is what he said, without really knowing what he was saying: “It doesn’t feel good.” This is what he thought: I’m a dead man. He wondered how many days he had left, and guessed that the answer was probably a single-digit number. He hung up the telephone and ran down the stairs from his workroom, at the top of the narrow Islington row house where he lived. The living-room windows had wooden shutters and, absurdly, he closed and barred them. Then he locked the front door.

Pankaj Mishra finds this memoir lacking in significant ways. His review resonated with my own assessment of Rushdie's life and work:

Certainly, Rushdie's neat oppositions between the secular and the religious, the light and the dark, and rational literary elites and irrational masses do not clarify the great disorder of the contemporary world. They belong to an intellectually simpler time, when non-western societies, politically insignificant and little-known, could be judged solely by their success or failure in following the great example of the secular-humanist west; and writing literary fiction could seem enough to make one feel, as Tim Parks wrote in a review of Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, "engaged on the right side of some global moral and political battle".

Indeed, such complacencies of imperial intellectual cultures were what Rushdie had bravely attacked in his brilliant early phase. "Works of art, even works of entertainment," he had pointed out in 1984, "do not come into being in a social and political vacuum; and … the way they operate in a society cannot be separated from politics, from history. For every text, a context." No text in our time has had contexts more various and illuminating than The Satanic Verses, or mixed politics and literature more inextricably, and with deeper consequences for so many. In Joseph Anton, however, Rushdie continues to reveal an unwillingness or inability to grasp them, or to abandon the conceit, useful in fiction but misleading outside it, that the personal is the geopolitical.

The Writer's Job

Tim Parks has a great piece on how the writing profession has changed in recent decades, how the market forces have altered the behavior of writers, and the importance of being grounded about one's motivations, expectations, and rewards in the writing life.

In the twentieth century people stopped just reading novels and poems and started studying them. It was a revolution. Suddenly everybody studied literature. At school it was obligatory. They did literature exams. They understood that when there are metaphors and patterns of symbolism and character development etc. then you have “literature.” They supposed that if you could analyze it, you could very probably do it yourself. Since enormous kudos was afforded to writers, and since it was now accepted that nobody needed to be tied to dull careers by such accidents of birth as class, color, sex, or even IQ, large numbers of people (myself included!) began to write. These people felt they knew what literature was and how to make it.

In the second half of the century the cost of publishing fell considerably, the number of fiction and poetry titles per annum shot up (about forty thousand fiction titles are published in the US each year), profits were squeezed, discounting was savage. A situation was soon reached where a precious few authors sold vast numbers of books while vast numbers of writers sold precious few books. Such however was the now towering and indeed international celebrity of the former that the latter threw themselves even more eagerly into the fray, partly because they needed their declining advances more often, partly in the hope of achieving such celebrity themselves.

It became clear that the task of the writer was not just to deliver a book, but to promote himself in every possible way. He launches a website, a Facebook page (I’m no exception), perhaps hires his own publicist. He attends literary festivals all over the world, for no payment. He sits on the jury for literary prizes for very little money, writes articles in return for a one-line mention of his recent publication, completes dozens of internet interviews, offers endorsements for the books of fellow writers in the hope that the compliment will be returned. It would not be hard to add to this list.

Cargo

Flash fiction by Usha Alexander

“I re-read your letter concerning your great-great-grandmother,” Sam said, opening a yellowed logbook upon his rosewood desk, the cargo manifest of a ship called Goodgrace, owned and captained by his great-grandfather Samuel Collins. Each page was encased in a plastic sleeve, which he turned delicately.

“My old grandma remembered her, the stories she told.” Brenda’s face was serious but not sad as she spoke. “She was probably just a teenager when she came over. She got pregnant on the ship and had her first baby soon after she landed. A boy.” Brenda peered sideways at the high, teak bookshelves surrounding her. "It took a lot of digging to learn the name of the ship."

Brenda wasn’t what the old man expected when he first received the letter requesting access to his family records; though, he’d been unaware of having any expectations until the moment she appeared. Statuesque, in a breezy white top and dark slacks, she stood with both hands clutching a faux-leather purse against her stomach. Her blackish hair diffused toward her shoulders in fuzzy ringlets, charmingly augmented with silver linings. He wondered how many white men—uninvited?—had interceded in generations past to render in her that walnut-brown skin, the indeterminate fall of her hair, surely a world apart from the African ancestress she’d come in search of.

“Impressive library for one family,” she remarked with awe.

“Yes.” He smiled, spread his arms, encouragingly. “Do feel free to have a look around.” He watched her step gingerly among the stacks, perusing the titles of ancient volumes, the pickled histories and cracked tomes gathered by generations of his Connecticut forebears. He admired the broad contours of her brow and cheek, arching and flexing when she paused to read, noting his Harvard diplomas on the wall, remarking on the age and historical value of his books. He could see that she was educated, if from a humble background. She’d probably attended a state school, maybe the first in her family to graduate college. Such things he’d learned to discern from the way a person walked, talked, dressed, smiled, since spending his retirement years as a volunteer physician at a clinic in New Haven.

“Here,” Sam said, inviting her to sit at his desk. He pointed to a page in the mouldering ledger. Brenda stopped and looked at him. He was surprised to see her formerly smooth brow now pinched with panic, as though he’d opened a page in her diary. He felt suddenly awkward, a voyeur pouring over her family secrets. But he determined to remain aloof. How could he, after all, take responsibility for the great errors of history?

“The Goodgrace made only two crossings before human cargo was outlawed.” He faltered, noticing for the first time how ridiculous was the ship’s name. “They’re listed here by sex and age. Sometimes an identifying detail or two.” He added, “Only about three-hundred slaves, in all. It never was the main family business.”

Brenda sat, primly, squinted a long while at the ledger, shoulders hunched, silent, drawing a finger slowly down each page.

He drummed his fingers upon his cheek. Why had he invited her to come? What had he hoped to gain from this awkward encounter with his legacy?

She gasped, her finger stopping under a scrawl: girl 15? tall comely enogh

Beads of sweat clustered upon the curve of Brenda’s nose. She closed her eyes and raised one hand to cover her open mouth, rested the other long forearm against the polished rosewood. Was she trembling?

Sam looked at Brenda, and then beyond her. He imagined her as a girl with dark black skin, shimmering with youth, imagined Captain Collins viewing her; taking her; selling her at auction. Counting his profits. Sam thought of his inheritance. He thought of his family, seeing it now enlarged by an unknown multitude of new and foreign characters, each one real as Captain Collins, as Brenda, as the tall, comely girl, who had toiled in the violence of bondage to the end of her days.

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The image above is of a holding chamber at the old slave market in Zanzibar. Some two-hundred individuals were held in this space for a week at a time, without food or exit; fetid water filled the space between the shelves.

Pollock on the Study of Classics in India

In this insightful and alarming talk (~20 mins, also detailed in this pdf), Sheldon Pollock, professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia University, describes the deep crisis in the study of the classics and classical languages in India, and why we should worry about it. Six million classical manuscripts lie unread in archives across India but today, Pollock claims, there aren't any noteworthy Indian scholars of classical literature, no one teaching pre-19th century works in major universities, and no journals being published. Many Indians did great work in early/mid-20th century, but "India has not produced another DD Kosambi. There is nobody in India today who has the philological and critical ... edge that Kosambi brought." If you like this talk, check out this interesting interview with Pollock during one of his India visits.

Addendum to My Gita Essay

For many motivated readers, a favorite strategy for deflecting criticism of Krishna's dubious advice to Arjuna is to argue that, based on the events in the Mahabharata, the justification for the war is absolutely clear (in comments, one person saw it on par with the Allied case against Hitler!). I responded to this point in part 2 of my essay (Part 1, Part 2) but it's worth drawing attention to it again:

Some defend the Gita by saying that the Kauravas’ bad behavior made the war unavoidable and eminently justified. Perhaps, but that’s not the point. The point is about the quality of the arguments Krishna uses to persuade Arjuna to fight. If the best moral justifications for the war purportedly exist outside the Gita, and some of the worst inside it, what have we left? Given all the bad faith reasoning and the starkly instrumental view of human life in the Gita, which many saw through even in ancient times, what makes the Gita a work of wisdom? Why not get the Gita off its exalted pedestal in our minds and let it be an uncelebrated episode in the Mahabharata—an artful plot element in an epic work of literature?

However, the case for "just war" is not at all clear in the Mahabharata. It's debatable—and not black and white—which is exactly what makes the Mahabharata great. For starters, the standard rules of succession were inadequate for the situation at hand: Dhritarashtra is blind, so his younger brother, Pandu, is made the king. But then Pandu lands a curse and retreats to the forest with his two wives, leaving Dhritarashtra to rule instead. Yudhisthira is the oldest son in the family but he and the other four Pandavas are not really fathered by Pandu (due to his curse), rather Pandu's two wives find some "divine" lovers in the forest (!), raising questions about the royal Kuru lineage of the Pandavas. Nor did Pandu rule anytime during Yudhisthira's life. So as the first son of the long reigning and elder brother Dhritarashtra—who in his heart wants his son to be the king—doesn't Duryodhana, a warrior as skilled as any and an able administrator, have a claim to succession as well? I mean a reasonable case can be made, right?

Meanwhile Duryodhana's ambition grows and he wants the entire kingdom for the Kauravas, not just the better half of the Kuru kingdom that he will inherit. He loathes the Pandavas, partly because he saw them as uppity and mean to him in their youth, as princes are wont to be. So as an adult, Duryodhana is scheming and vicious to the Pandavas. But he can be kind to others, such as to the low-caste Karna. "Birth is obscure," he said, "and men are like rivers whose origins are often unknown." So while the Kauravas are not all-bad (it's worth noting that the elders, respected by both sides, end up supporting them, however reluctantly), the Pandavas are not all-good. The Pandavas spurn and insult Karna based on his caste; Arjuna's pride leads to Eklavya chopping off his thumb—and his hopes and livelihood. Draupadi taunts Duryodhana and his father's blindness. And why does Yudhisthira get so little flak for gambling and losing everything twice, including his half of the Kuru kingdom (after being forgiven the first time, he is foolish enough to play again), even wagering his own wife's body? What kind of man does that? Can we trust his judgment again with a kingdom? (And this when his real father is none other than the Lord of Judgment, Dharma.)

Is it any less obscene that while the Gita's Krishna goads Arjuna to fight the supposedly evil Kauravas, he has asked his own Yadava army to fight on the Kaurava side—because he wants to be seen as neutral! Countless foot soldiers get killed—pawns in the dharmic imperatives of big men, which we are so eager to applaud. The Pandavas, too, break the protocols of war and we rationalize it, why? Further, was it, or was it not, in the public-interest to continue the 13 years of Kaurava rule? These are all legitimate readings, befitting great literature. I think people are too often blinded by their instinct to defend the side "God" is on, or they are too easily seduced by simple narratives of good vs. evil. Anyhow, that's my take this evening.
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Image: Screen grab from Peter Brook's Mahabharata showing (L->R) Bhisma, Gandhari, Dhritarashtra, and Drona.

The Bhagavad Gita Revisited - Part 2

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core. This is part two of a two-part critique (Part 1 is the appetizer with the Gita’s historical and literary context. This is the main course with the textual critique).
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The Bhagavad Gita, less than one percent of the sprawling Mahabharata, contains 700 verses in 18 chapters. It opens with Arjuna’s crisis on the battlefield, right before the start of the Great War. Turning to his friend and charioteer, Arjuna cries out,

‘O Krishna, I see my own relations here anxious to fight, and my limbs grow weak; my mouth is dry, my body shakes, and my hair is standing on end. My skin burns, and the bow Gandiva has slipped from my hand; my mind seems to be whirling.’

Arjuna is one of the bravest warriors alive and this visceral physical response, it is amply clear, is not due to performance anxiety, or fear of injury or death. Rather, it arises from Arjuna’s grave doubts over whether he is doing the right thing. He and his Pandava brothers wanted a minimally fair share of their material inheritance, but the devious, stubborn, and unjust Kauravas rebuffed them repeatedly. Though his cause is righteous enough, Arjuna now feels that the ends do not justify the means. He continues,

‘O Krishna, I have no desire for victory, or for a kingdom or pleasures. Of what use is a kingdom or pleasure or even life, if those for whose sake we desire these things—teachers, fathers, sons, grandfathers, uncles, in-laws, grandsons and others with family ties—are engaging in this battle, renouncing their wealth and their lives? Even if they were to kill me, I would not want to kill them, not even to become ruler of the three worlds. How much less for the earth alone? … We are prepared to kill our own relations out of greed for the pleasures of a kingdom. Better for me if the [Kauravas] were to attack me in battle and kill me unarmed and unresisting.’

Who among us can fail to be moved by Arjuna’s anguish? Hopelessly confused, Arjuna pleads with Lord Krishna to show him the way. Krishna obliges, taking on the role of a teacher to help Arjuna figure out the right course of action, which Krishna believes is to fight this war. The wisdom of the Gita—and the claim that it remains a relevant guide to our inner battlefield—is inseparable from Krishna’s advice to Arjuna. So to evaluate the Gita, we need to evaluate the arguments Krishna uses to persuade Arjuna to fight. How good are these arguments?

I’m aware that my reading of the Gita—like every other reading of it—is subjective and selective; I know that there are other ways of reading it. I’ve approached the Gita as expository literature, using the same yardsticks of truth and beauty that I take to other literary texts. I agree with Eknath Easwaran, an admirer and well-known translator of the Gita, when he says, ‘To understand the Gita, it is important to look beneath the surface of its injunctions and see the mental state involved.’ I’ve tried to do the same. I know that the Gita is not ‘mere literature’ to millions of Hindus, including many of my family and friends. It is also sacred scripture, guide to practical wisdom, source of personal and social identity, cultural and national pride, and more. My intention is not to offend but this book review will likely unsettle many; a few will respond in angry and defensive ways. May they find in the Gita the wisdom to forgive my indiscretions.

Son of Blazing Glory

Flash fiction by R Alexander

A cool breeze riffled several yellowed papers lying on Cyril's drafting table. Unable to concentrate for days, he had returned to an old vice, reminiscence, and sat now hunched over the slanted desk, elbows bent and sorting through a box of work from his college days: architecture textbooks, papers he'd written, and maps and plans for houses he'd once imagined. Brittle and crackling in the breeze, the papers he had lifted out and set aside were an irritation, and without looking up he stretched out his hand, picked up a stone he had there for the purpose, and placed it on the moving papers to still them. The stone, porous and grey, a relic of his dissolved marriage—his wife had been a hydrologist—felt warm from the sun that fell into this room through a long, high-arching window.

"This is all you've made?" The sound of this voice—it was unnecessarily loud—startled Cyril from his thoughts. The tone was cutting and judgmental.

He looked up. His father, Lambert, stood there, taller than he had been in life, smiling, beaming even, as though happy to see his only son. Two feathered wings stood out from his back, the cloth of his suit shredded at the scapulae. Cyril looked on in disbelief but also in awe. The wings were like those of a massive and muscular bird, and also somehow different, radiant and calming.

Noticing his son's fascination, Lambert smiled even more broadly. Then gesturing over his shoulder, he said with assurance, "They're what you'll have at my age."

The man had hair, again, too, a dark, slick sheen of hair, and wore a charcoal grey pinstripe, with a vest and black tie. "Age?" Cyril asked, his voice shriller than he had anticipated. "What is your age?"

The man frowned.

"You're dead. You don't have an age," Cyril said.

"Ah, yes," Lambert said sarcastically. "That's true. I'm ageless." He began to move about the room. Paunchy and pallid, his size, his bulk, became manifest as he moved. "This is your work now? Your life?" The large, powerful wings knocked a photo from off the mantle and gusted a stack of unpaid bills from off a filing cabinet. He stooped and gathered the large, framed, color photograph and stood up again, squinting at it and angling the glass to cut the glare.

"Where did you come from, anyway?" Cyril asked.

The Bhagavad Gita Revisited - Part 1

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core. This is part one of a two-part critique. (Part 1 is the appetizer with the Gita’s historical and literary context. Part 2 is the main course with the textual critique).
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In mid-first millennium BCE, a great spiritual awakening was underway in areas around the middle Ganga. People were moving away from the old Vedic religion—which revolved around rituals, animal sacrifices, and nature gods—to more abstract, inner-directed, and contemplative ideas. They now asked about the nature of the self and consciousness, thought and perception. They asked if virtue and vice were absolute or mere social conventions. Personal spiritual quests, aided by meditation and renunciation of material gain, had slowly gathered pace. From this churn arose new ideas like karma and dharma, non-dualism, and the unity of an individual’s soul (atman) with the universal soul (Brahman)—all pivotal ideas in Hinduism.

Some of these innovations in thought soon made their way into the texts we now know as the Upanishads, setting them qualitatively apart from the earlier Vedas. All of this occurred in the context of great sociopolitical and economic changes, marked by the rise of cities, trade and commerce, social mobility, public debates, new institutions of state, and even some early republics. This was also the world of the Buddha, Mahavira, and Carvaka.

The Great War of Yore

By this time, versions of a Mahabharata story had been circulating for centuries. Perhaps inspired by a war that took place c. 950 BCE around modern Delhi (the date is tentative), the story, through oral transmission, took on a life of its own. In The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009), Wendy Doniger writes that the earliest bards who told the Mahabharata story came from a caste of charioteers, who served as drivers, confidantes, and bodyguards to the Kshatriya warrior-castes. While on military campaigns, they recited stories around campfires. (No wonder God is a charioteer in the epic! Even Karna is raised by a charioteer.) In later ages and in times of peace, many bards took their performance art to lay audiences in villages and folk festivals. The story also came to be recited during royal sacrifices, where the Brahmins slowly took over its delivery and evolution, eventually writing it down in Sanskrit. Its "final form" dates from 300 BCE-300 CE and ranges from 75K to 100K verses, seven to ten times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. (Read an outline of the story here.)

In Which an Old Man Cloaked in La Calavera Catrina Engages in Dialogue

Flash fiction by R Alexander, a relatively new author on Shunya's Notes; see his bio line at the end of this piece.

Conscious of the dust his shuffling feet raised, a man moved slowly up the rutted incline of the arroyo. His brown hand clutched a gnarled knob of a walking stick. A shadow moved beside the road. The old man looked around to see who might be watching him, but his cataracts hazed the light which stabbed at the back of his eyes. It may have been that he had learned to tilt and angle his head like this to gain the purchase of sound as much as for the sake of the light. In any case, his head tilting, his arms pulling roughly, and his head turning and shifting gave him the look of someone intently focused and supernally aware of his surroundings, as though he commanded the physical landscape but chose, out of wisdom, to allow it its recalcitrance.

A boy, six or eight judging by his thin frame, curious about the old man's serape, tugged his sway-backed grey towards the old man. The boy's knees stuck out beneath blue shorts, and his shoeless feet felt warmth and comfort in the dust.

“Your burro has more sense than you,” the old man muttered without humor.

“He’s in no hurry, old man.” The boy's burro pulled away, its worn hooves scraping the dirt.

The old man snorted. "What makes you think I'm old?" He wanted to keep walking but the effort of talking had stopped him. “I'm younger than you,” he said, his voice coughing the last few syllables. Dust and dry air scraped the back of the man's throat, so between his toothless gums he formed up enough spittle to spit without dribbling on himself. From between his lips passed a spray of slime and grit.

The boy stopped tugging the rope and watched as the old man wiped his chin, to assure himself that it was dry.

The old man looked at the boy and frowned. “You'll never convince him to do what you want,” he said. “You may force him, but he'll never believe a word you tell him.” The old man spoke with some foreign-sounding accent, using the same word for belief as the boy's grandmother had.

High overhead wisps of cirrus stitched the fontanelle of the sky. The boy raised a finger and pointed past the huddle of village huts. “The cemetery is that way.”

The man brushed the accumulated dust off the image of the Calavera Catrina embroidered into his serape in gold and crimson and blue, the color of the sky. "Go away, pest," he said. “I have no sugar for you.”

“Do you know where you are headed?” The boy's palms ached from rope burns.

Three Hundred Ramayanas?

Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations is a 1991 essay by A.K. Ramanujan, scholar and man of letters from South India. In it Ramanujan surveys the wide range of Ramayana stories extant in Asia. The essay came to my attention because it was just dropped (after its inclusion in 2006) from the B.A. History (Hons.) course at Delhi University, owing to protests by right-wing Hindutva types who don't like the idea of so many Ramayanas, including some that, according to Ramanujan, have Rama and Sita as siblings.

[clip] ... This story is usually told to suggest that for every such Rama there is a Ramayana. The number of Ramayanas and the range of their influence in South and Southeast Asia over the past twenty-five hundred years or more are astonishing. Just a list of languages in which the Rama story is found makes one gasp: Annamese, Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan—to say nothing of Western languages. Through the centuries, some of these languages have hosted more than one telling of the Rama story. Sanskrit alone contains some twenty-five or more tellings belonging to various narrative genres (epics, kavyas or ornate poetic compositions, puranas or old mythological stories, and so forth). If we add plays, dance-dramas, and other performances, in both the classical and folk traditions, the number of Ramayanas grows even larger. To these must be added sculpture and bas-reliefs, mask plays, puppet plays and shadows plays, in all the many South and Southeast Asian cultures." Camille Bulcke (1950), a student of the Ramayana, counted three hundred tellings. It’s no wonder that even as long ago as the fourteenth century, Kumaravyasa, a Kannada poet, chose to write a Mahabharata, because he heard the cosmic serpent which upholds the earth groaning under the burden of Ramayana poets ... In this paper, indebted for its data to numerous previous translators and scholars, I would like to sort out for myself, and I hope for others, how these hundreds of tellings of a story in different cultures, languages, and religious traditions relate to each other: what gets translated, transplanted, transposed.

More here.  Read Amardeep Singh's defense of the essay here and watch a heartening protest at DU. A paradoxical effect of DU's decision will be an increase in the popularity of this essay, and bringing it to the attention of new audiences like me who had never heard of it before.

Revisiting the Bhagavad Gita

Here is a clip from Peter Brook’s brilliant adaptation of the Mahabharata (1989). It contains the film’s rendition of the Bhagavad Gita. I am rereading the Gita now and plan to write a review soon. I’ll argue that given the catastrophic destruction of life by the war’s end, a more reasonable response to the Gita is to question, rather than admire, Krishna’s "wisdom", and to see Arjuna’s straightforward doubts about the war as more genuine and human. In my estimation, the arguments that Krishna employs to convince Arjuna to fight are not very convincing, and are often pernicious. By extension, I think the Gita is not a worthy guide to life (or the ‘inner battlefield’), at least not in terms of moral reasoning. It seems to me that Krishna, using a dazzling array of abstract ideas and psychology, brainwashes Arjuna into thinking that he has penetrated his illusions to understand ‘ultimate reality’, from which vantage point the great warrior is able to overcome all his moral doubts: hardly a commendable state.

My critique will be hard to dismiss as an example of Western/Eurocentric bias (especially by irate Indian readers, some of whom did just that with Wendy Doniger’s take on the Gita), for I intend to amplify a critique of the Gita’s philosophical worldview that was extant within India even two millennia ago, in the thought of the Buddha himself and then Nagarjuna. (To be continued...)

Magister Xu

Flash fiction by R Alexander, a new author on Shunya's Notes who will contribute a piece each month; see his bio line at the end of this post.

The cut glass bottles tinkled in their felt-lined compartments, rattling loose their stoppers. Magister Xu balanced his beaten, cardboard, leather-bound case atop his knees, as the carriage swayed from side to side, and clutched it with a careful, arthritic grip. Though the driver called noisily to one of the horses, the wind and movement swept away whatever correction might have been intended. Magister Xu took the cap from off his head and laid it not ostentatiously atop the case. The cloth was embroidered with the patterns of the night sky, stars and symbols indicating their movements and meanings.

From courtesy, he tried to avoid looking into the eyes of the woman sitting quietly across from him.  When Magister Xu averted his eyes, however, he found he seemed instead to be searching for a glimpse of her ankles. The thought of this unsettled him.

He cleared his throat. “You are traveling home?” It was forward of him, he knew to speak to a woman without an introduction, but it settled his mind some to hear the sound of his voice rising over the embarrassing sound that seemed to emanate from his lap, the sound of his case of glass bottles.

The woman sat motionless and silent and stared straight ahead. A yellow veil partially covered her delicately dusted face. He forgot to resist looking at her, and saw her wide, painted eyes, frightened and tearful. He had been thoughtless, he realized. There was no home for this girl. And for him to speak to her, when they were alone like this: such forwardness she must endure.

The heat was nearly unbearable. The coach was uncovered to the sky and the sun, which was no longer high, leered through the trees, dappling the travelers in an animated flow of motley.

They rode like this for an hour until Magister Xu began to nod off to sleep. His head felt heavy and fell repeatedly to his chest, as Master Xu dreamt. His wife, appearing older than she did even now, wore the heavy red silk of a bride. Her face was uncovered. He saw himself wearing the crisp white linen of the groom. He smiled. The stars on his silver cap glinted like a chandelier's baubles.

A look of annoyance gathered in his wife's face. “We are nought but dust.” The words came out in his old Nana's dialect, the language of a foolish people.

“Concentration," he said. “Potency.” Or did he? He had meant to flatter this woman, though over time he had grown to know her to be thoughtless and self-absorbed.

“Sir!”

He felt a hand on his knee. What had prompted this? 

Pamuk on Why He Writes

An excerpt from Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Prize lecture in which he talks about his life, his writing, his father, Istanbul, and more (via Usha):

As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

Herodotus, the Iliad, and 9/11

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Homer’s Iliad is the story of an epic war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The apparent cause of the war was the ‘abduction’ of Helen by Paris—Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta; Paris was the son of Priam, king of Troy. Menelaus, his pride wounded, called on other Greek kings bound to him by an oath. Joining forces, they set sail and laid siege to the coastal city of Troy in Asia Minor. Mostly an account of the last days of the war, the Iliad teems with intrigue, character, and incident.

Herodotus, the 5th century BCE historian regarded as the father of history, lived more than three hundred years after the Iliad was written. He is justly famous for preferring rational—rather than mythical and supernatural—explanations for human events; to understand his past he looked to the actions, character, and motivations of men. Among the more charming passages of Histories is his take on the Trojan War. In his day and age, the Iliad was considered a true account of Greek ancestry and it was obligatory for every Greek schoolboy to read it. Cultivated Greek gents were expected to recite colorful stretches from it.

From the start, Herodotus had trouble with the Iliad. He found it odd that the Trojans, ‘when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single [Spartan] girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam’. He doubted that Helen could have been taken from Sparta against her wishes, and even if she was, wasn’t that deed the work of a rogue, unworthy of such a large mobilization by the Greeks? What also didn’t sit well with his sense of human nature was the response of the otherwise reasonable Trojans to the Greek invasion, for ‘surely neither Priam nor his family could have been so infatuated as to endanger their own persons, their children and their city, merely that Paris might possess Helen.’

The Danger of a Single Story

This talk by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie is not to be missed. I think it's worth the time for anyone interested in stories, language, reading and writing, not to mention class, politics, history, cultural and imperial hegemony, mental colonization, and so much more.

The Insularity of American Literature

Check out this essay by Anis Shivani on what is wrong with American literature. Sure, lots of red meat here, and one can always poke holes in his thesis: isn't there a super great writer X that Shivani is overlooking? But that objection may well reinforce Shivani's point, which I take to be meaningful in the sense of a statement like "Outsiders find rural Bihar rough to travel through", and citing a comfortable itinerary does not negate the qualitative truth of the statement. :-) In any case, I think it is decent food for thought. Enjoy.

"There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world...not the United States," Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, recently said. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature...That ignorance is restraining." ...

Engdahl couldn't be more correct. We are too insular. We specialize in quantity, not quality. Our publishing model, like that of the lapsed auto industry, is a failed one. It survives only because of our gigantism--mere volume is sufficient to ensure a certain amount of financial success, but it is not producing a worthwhile cultural product. Just as we might have 500 television channels but not one will ever offer the challenging movies of Buñuel or Godard, or a Wagner opera, we might produce 175,000 books a year, but quality is elusive. What we're talking about is a business model that is outdated, cannot keep up with globalization. There ought to be no bail-out of American writers. It is a case of market monopoly run amok, taking self-publicity for truth.

We have a generally overinflated estimation of our "literary giants"--Roth, Updike, DeLillo, Pynchon, the perennially rumored contenders for the Nobel Prize--that the rest of the world might not share. Consider, from the point of view of someone in Tokyo or Cairo or Lima, what each of these writers has to offer them. These are American writers first, not in the sense that Fitzgerald or Hemingway were (questioning their Americanness), but American in a curiously isolationist way, preoccupied exclusively with the predicaments of our nation, and no other in the world. The knee-jerk defense American newspaper and magazine editors mounted immediately after Engdahl's comments--not even taking a moment to pause and consider whether he had a point--should tell us a lot about the degree to which sheer defense of our dinosaur model of literature is the driving force for so-called critics. How could they say that about us, those sissy Europeans? Our writers are as good as any other country's, no, better, yes, much better! The Europeans are just jealous. Their writers are too parochial, too small, too little studied. Did you ever hear of Le Clézio? Who is he? We don't read him here. We don't do any scholarship on him. Not to mention Dario Fo. Dario Who? Phoo!

Songs of Kabir

A new translation of poems by Kabir, the great 15th century Sufi poet from India, is due out on 5th April. "Transcending divisions of creed, challenging social distinctions of all sorts, and celebrating individual unity with the divine, the poetry of Kabir is one of passion and paradox, of mind-bending riddles and exultant riffs. These new translations by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, one of India’s finest contemporary poets, bring out the richness, wit, and power of a literary and spiritual master." Below is a sample (a few more poems from this volume have appeared in Poetry Magazine):

Except That It Robs You of Who You Are

Except that it robs you of who you are,
What can you say about speech?
Inconceivable to live without
And impossible to live with,
Speech diminishes you.
Speak with a wise man, there’ll be
Much to learn; speak with a fool,
All you get is prattle.
Strike a half-empty pot, and it’ll make
A loud sound; strike one that is full,
Says Kabir, and hear the silence.

S. Anand on Dalit Literature

In The Caravan, S. Anand provides an overview of modern Dalit literature, as well as insights into the portrayal of Dalits by many famous non-Dalit writers like Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Rohinton Mistry. While often sympathetic, he notes, these portrayals also tend to be unidimensional, where "Dalit characters lack distinct subjecthood prior to their involvement with high-caste characters." Anand is co-founder of Navayana, "India’s first and only publishing house to exclusively focus on the issue of caste from anticaste perspective."

The journey of modern Dalit literature has been a difficult one. But even though it has not necessarily enjoyed the support of numbers (in what has come to be the trade publishing market) we must engage with what Dalits are writing—not simply for reasons of authenticity, or as a concession to identity politics, but simply because of the aesthetic value of this body of writing, and for the insights it offers into the human condition. In a society that is still largely unwilling to recognise Dalits as equal, rights-bearing human beings, in a society that is inherently indifferent to the everyday violence against Dalits and their near-total ghettoisation in various spheres of social and cultural activity, in a society unwilling to share social and cultural resources equitably with Dalits unless mandated by law (as seen in the anti-reservation discourse), Dalit literature has the potential to humanise non-Dalits and sensitise them to a world into which they have no insight. But before we can understand what Dalit literature is seeking to accomplish, we need first to come to terms with the stranglehold of non-Dalit representations of Dalits.

More here. The other founder of Navayana is Ravikumar, author of Venomous Touch, a collection of his writings translated from Tamil.

Arab Poetry of Resistance

In the video below (via Vijay Prashad on facebook), Sudhanva Deshpande recites a few poems of resistance from the great poets of the Arab world, including Palestine and "the Middle-East at a time when the region is going through one of the most historic revolutions." The poems, recited in Hindustani with scrolling English translations, include Ticket (Samih al-Qasim), Ek Diwaliye ki Report (Samih al-Qasim), Filistini Ladka (an extract by Safi Abdi), Poochtach (Mahmoud Darwish), and Dil-e-Mann, Musafir-e-Mann (Faiz Ahmed Faiz). FYI, this is also the centenary year of Faiz's birth and Himal Southasian has a special issue on the man.

A Word on Statistics

A poem by Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)
________________________________________

Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn't take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four -- well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Decolonizing My Mind

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

The modern era of European colonialism began in the Americas with bands of adventurers seeking El Dorado. It evolved into predatory monopolies like the East India Company and ended with European states exerting direct control over the economic and political life of the colonies. Alongside came great developments in the art of controlling the natives, through military, political, and cultural means. Let’s look at some cultural means of controlling the natives, particularly through language.

When it comes to colonial quests, military might is what breaches the metaphorical Gates of Damascus. Regime change follows. Thereafter, the most efficient and durable means of colonial control happens via culture. Culture holds the keys to how a group sees itself and knows its place in the world. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o—acclaimed Kenyan novelist, professor, and author of Decolonizing the Mind—has pointed out, ‘Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.’ [1]

When done right, the native comes to elevate and mimic his master’s ways, to see his own culture as inferior, and to look down on his past as ‘a wasteland of non-achievement’. He begins to defer to the colonizer’s ideas on fundamental things like beauty, art, and politics. In time, he begins to understand himself and his culture through the eyes of the colonizer—using the latter’s concepts, categories, and judgments. Before too long, he turns into a proxy for his master: colonialism with a native face.

How does the colonizer gain such control? The easiest method is to actively spread his language among the natives, and to simultaneously denigrate the language of the natives as crude and unfit for proper education. It is amazing how much mileage this delivers. Make the colonizer’s language the lingua franca of imperial administration, accord prestige and upward mobility to those who learn it in colonial schools, and before too long, there is a feeding frenzy among a native minority. Such has been the way of the great colonialists of history: the Arabs in the 7-8th centuries, the British and the French in the 19th, the Russians with the Baltic States in the 20th. Ngugi writes,

For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process: the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature, and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the colonizer. The domination of a people’s language by the language of the colonizing nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonized.