Category: Fiction & Poetry
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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?
Category: Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, Fiction & Poetry, Justice, Philosophy, Politics, Religion -
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,Category: Books & Authors, Culture, Fiction & Poetry, History, Justice, Philosophy, Politics, Religion -
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 Brahmanical Hinduism.Category: Art & Cinema, Books & Authors, Culture, Fiction & Poetry, History, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Video -
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.
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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...)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 AreExcept 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.
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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.
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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.Category: Fiction & Poetry -
Decolonizing My Mind
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments. NB: an updated version of this essay is here.)
On English in India and the Linguistic Hierarchies of Colonized Minds
The modern era of European colonialism began in the Americas with bands of adventurers seeking El Dorado. Their early intrusions evolved into predatory monopolies like the East India Company and European states exerting direct control over the economic and political life of the colonies. The natives tended to not welcome and cooperate with the intruders, so alongside came great developments in the art of subjugating the natives, through military, political, and cultural means. In this essay, I’ll look at some cultural means of controlling the natives, particularly through language, and its effect on the psyche of the colonized, using examples from Africa and India. -
On Bal vs. Dalrymple
Every so often, a war of the words breaks out between two literary types. Onlookers, or should I say onliners, gather around to cheer, deride, or simply watch the tamasha with wonder and amusement. Many such exchanges have happened on the pages of Outlook India. A new one has just unfolded in Open Magazine between Hartosh Singh Bal, its political editor (and 3QD columnist), and William Dalrymple, UK author.The Literary Raj — the opening salvo by Hartosh Singh Bal
The piece you ran is blatantly racist — rejoinder by William Dalrymple
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The War and Peace of Hindi Literature
Daisy Rockwell on the first ever English translation of Jootha Sach (“False Truth”) by Yashpal (1903-76)—published as This Is Not that Dawn.
I read War and Peace a number of years ago in Allahabad, India, in March or April, when the temperatures begin to soar. Our roof-top apartment, so delightfully airy during other months, slowly transformed into an oven. This was how we learned why no landlord in India lives in the top floor of their house if they can avoid it. Frequent power outages exacerbate the situation, and by mid-day each day, the best course of action was to lie in the dark as immobile as possible and read. Napoleon’s ill-advised campaign into Russia, the arrival of winter and the freeze-out of the French army provided a cooling balm to my imagination, if not my body.I was reading War and Peace so that I might be able to continue to say, with confidence, that the Hindi novel Jhootha Sach, which means “False truth,” was “the War and Peace of Hindi literature.” It was a claim that was often thrown around, and one that I had carelessly made myself. Reading one book to find out if it can be used as an exemplar of another one has already read is ostensibly going about things backwards. But I had a particular motivation: Jhootha Sach was untranslated and I wanted to make the case that this fact was a tragedy for literature lovers around the world. Just imagine if War and Peace was sitting around in Russia, untranslated, and no non-Russian readers were able to access it? How culturally impoverished we would be if that were the case, even those of us who had never bothered to read it because of its notorious heft?
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Trying is All We Have
(An excerpt from a longer work of fiction. Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
It has been a month since they first slept together. He wondered why their verbal sparring had increased in recent days. Just this morning at her place, Liz set off on the youth-obsessed American culture and the skinny ideals of female beauty manufactured by the consumer industry—a conspiracy, she said, to keep women down.‘But ideals of female beauty have always existed in every culture,’ Ved argued.
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Coetzee’s Ethics
Here is the back cover blurb of a volume of essays titled J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature. Edited by Anton Leist and Peter Singer, published in June 2010 by CUP.
In 2003, South African writer J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his riveting portrayals of racial repression, sexual politics, the guises of reason, and the hypocrisy of human beings toward animals and nature. Coetzee was credited with being “a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilization.” The film of his novel Disgrace, starring John Malkovich, brought his challenging ideas to a new audience.Anton Leist and Peter Singer have assembled an outstanding group of contributors who probe deeply into Coetzee’s extensive and extraordinary corpus. They explore his approach to ethical theory and philosophy and pay particular attention to his representation of the human-animal relationship. They also confront Coetzee’s depiction of the elementary conditions of life, the origins of morality, the recognition of value in others, the sexual dynamics between men and women, the normality of suppression, and the possibility of equality in postcolonial society. With its wide-ranging consideration of philosophical issues, especially in relation to fiction, this volume stands alone in its extraordinary exchange of ethical and literary inquiry.
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Readings from ‘Tablet & Pen’
An evening of music, poetry, and other readings inspired by the new anthology of literature, Tablet & Pen, hosted by its editor Reza Aslan (approx two hours). Though the anthology is about “literary landscapes from the modern Middle East”, it includes selections from South Asia. While most performances were quite good, particularly resonant to me were Ajay Naidu’s reading of a poem by Zeeshan Sahil (@ 33 mins), Kiran Ahluwalia’s singing (@ 38 mins), and Azra Raza’s reading of two poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (@ 49 mins).
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Ithaca by Cavafy
Sean Connery’s marvelous reading of Ithaca, the gorgeous poem by CP Cavafy (translated from the Greek).
The poem inspired my friend Leanne Ogasawara to write a wonderful short essay, exploring “what these Ithakas mean”. She writes,
Category: Fiction & Poetry
