And here we light a candle from the flames of a great writer’s righteous discontent that he kept articulating throughout his life, at times subtly through his art on the stage or the screen and when necessary directly through acts of protest played on the streets. Girish Karnad was born in a generation of rebellious Kannada writers and radical thinkers that included U R Ananathamurthy, P Lankesh, Chandrashekhara Kambara, AK Ramanujan and Poornnachandra Thejaswi who were all initially inspired by India’s independence struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi  and later by the socialist ideals of Ram Manohar Lohia and the anti-caste ideals of B R Ambedkar. But for them, this tradition went back to the twelfth century Shaivites like Basavaanna, Mahadevi Akka and Allama Prabhu who had created small models of an egalitarian society that interrogated the hierarchies of caste, class and gender thus sowing the seeds of radical spirituality with its contempt for material power, political as well as financial.  No wonder one of Girish Karnad’s finest plays, Tale Danda ( Punishment by Beheading) was inspired by the life of  Basava – that had also fascinated a great scholar like MM Kalburgi who proclaimed, after a profound study of Basava’s life and ideals that Basava was not ‘Hindu’ in the orthodox sense, for which he was first chastised and then murdered by the pedlars of an insular, hateful and casteist version of Hinduism. It was natural that the writer of Tale Danda was one of the first to respond to this callous act of cowardice and shocking intolerance.

This egalitarian political vein was strong in Girish Karnad’s work from the very beginning. Indeed, like many writers of his generation like Ananthamurthy, he was fascinated by the basic existential questions of being and becoming, freedom, choice, justice, gender, identity and death as is evident in his plays like Yayati, Hayavadana , Nagamandala and Agni mattu Male ( Fire and Rain); but myth, folklore and history never remained the same once he touched them. The image of the Emperor in Tughaq is not that of the idiosyncratic ruler many of us had grown up with, but that of a visionary idealist assailed by doubt and dilemma, defeated by his simple credulousness and trust in the opportunistic sycophants who had besieged his court. This allegory of the Nehruvian era gains a new relevance and meaning in our time when Nehru’s secular legacy is downplayed and his image deliberately deflated so that he is replaced by the parochial Hindu leaders of his time. Girish also retrieves Tipu Sultan’s real image as a fighter against the colonialists in his play named after him. We may recall, to the chagrin of many, including the political leaders of Karnataka, he had opposed the naming of the Bangalore airport after Kempa Gowda and suggested it be a memorial to the dauntless Sultan. The actor and the filmmaker in him only complemented the formidable playwright who had revolutionised Indian theatre along with the likes of Mohan Rakesh, Vijay Tendulkar and Badal Sircar.

Slavoj Zizek in a recent essay, ‘The Poetic Torture House of Language’ said that there are times when language has to be tortured to make it tell the truth. If language is the house of being as Heidegger says, when the subject that inhabits is evil, the genuine writer is compelled to create new structures of language, to make it strange and torment the language to make it speak the truth or leave the land of lies altogether as many German writers really did during the Third Reich.  Following this use of Elfried Jelinek’s violent imagery, Zizek points to the need to critically re-read the writings of the nationalists at a time when crimes and human right violations are committed in the name of a jingoistic and communal nationalism. Though he takes examples from his own fragmented and torn Eastern Europe, his exhortation for a careful re-examination of our textbooks of history and celebrated ‘nationalistic’ writings is equally applicable to India today. Like some of his contemporaries, Girish Karnad was acutely aware of this demand of truth that forced him to innovate alike the language and structure of drama as a literary form as well as theatre as a mode of physical communication. But he did not stop with a notional avant-gardism; he knew, as the theorists like Peter Burger or Jacques Ranciere or playwrights like Bertolt Brecht and Wole Soyinka did, that to be avant-garde is also to be political and to interrogate the existing ‘common-sense’ notions about life and society. And when called for, he did extend that politics beyond theatre and cinema and beyond his unconcealed preference for his mother-tongue as his first language of expression with due respect for India’s multilingualism and cultural plurality, as evidenced by  his resignation from the Chairmanship of FTII, Pune when Emergency was declared in India by the then-government , his consistently uncompromising  stance against the Hindutva hegemony, his open protest against the destruction of Babri Masjid, his sharp criticism of V S Naipaul’s Islamophobia at the Tata Literature Live Literary Festival in Bombay that had bestowed its ‘Life-time Achievement Award’ on the Nobel Prize-winning writer, his participation in ‘Not in My Name’ and ‘Me too an Urban Naxal’ protests, his irrepressible rage ‘against the dying of the light’ as expressed in his intense responses to the murder of MM Kalburgi , Gowri Lankesh and other thinkers and writers and his legitimate intolerance towards all forms of intolerance. Let me close my words with the translation of a few lines I chanced to write in my language following the planned day-light murder of MM Kalburgi, a friend and inspirer of Girish Karnad, equally applicable to Girish himself:

BEWARE (2015)
Beware of my silence!
It is heavier than speech,
A ceaseless river in search of
A new earth, like my Basava’s vachanas.

Beware of my words!
They can change the wind’s directions,
Restore to life every buried truth
Turn every pavement-stone into God,
Every sewer into Ganga
And every scavenger into a saint.

Beware of my magic!
It can transform your bullets
Into garlands for my master
Until he dances with your skulls
Over your ashes in the burning ground.

I will lend my voice to words
Your lexicons had silenced.
I will name planets
That were never in your orbit.
I will create new laws
For a new country none has seen
Where the first human will be born.

Beware of my words:
They have many tongues like the sea.
They are tomorrow’s seeds
Set to enlighten many more Buddhas.

My eyes are now polestars
And my breath, the borderless wind.

Beware! I am more alive now
Than when I was alive!
Beware! Beware!

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

The post Remembering Girish Karnad in a Time of Trauma appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
Pablo Neruda, another great poet of our times, advocated “impure poetry” in his 1935 manifesto,  Towards an Impure Poetry,  a poetry that  carries the dust of distances and smells of lilies and urine: “ The used surfaces of things, the wear that hands have given to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things, all lend a curious attractiveness to reality that we should not underestimate…”He had said in that manifesto. In 1966, again he wrote:  “I have always wanted the hands of people to be seen in poetry,” and added: “I have always preferred a poetry where the fingerprints show. A poetry of loam where the water can sing. A poetry of bread where everyone may eat.” We know how this intuitive connection to the masses remained a feature of his oeuvre right from his Residence on Earth and became more intense as he grew turning him into a biblical prophet of sorts, the voice of the voiceless, reminding us of  another great poet of our time, Czeslaw Milosz the Polish poet., to whom poetry was “a participation in the humanly modulated time” and who believed that the poetry that does not address the destiny of nations is useless. According to him,  “in a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”. He warned the wrong-doers: “You who have wronged a simple man/ Bursting into laughter at his suffering…/Do not feel safe. The poet remembers./You may kill him- a new one will be born./Deeds and talks will be recorderd” ( You Who Have Wronged).

The greatest poets of our time, from Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht and Mahmoud Darwish  to Rabindranath Tagore ,Faiz Ahmed Faiz  and Bei Dao are united by what Paz calls the apocalyptic element: that one  finds in the  poets we have cited besides a range of poets from   Walt Whitman, Garcia Lorca, Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Yannis Ritsos  and  Cesar Vallejo to Paul Eluard,  Louis Aragon, Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Nazim Hikmet, Mahmood Darwish, Anna Akhmatova, Cavafy, Zbignew Herbert, , Wislawa Szymborsca and  Ko Un, not to speak of earlier poets from Shakepeare to Alexander Pushkin, William Blake, Baudelaire, Rilke , Mallarme, Machado  and Alexander Blok.  just to take a few names.  Their texts instantly make visible the now-obscure links between mantic practices and poetry, between magic, shamanism, possession and oracle on the one hand and poetic vision, inspiration, power and incantation on the other. The poet thus reenchants the disenchanted world by turning poetry into a symbolic act intended to transform the world. Like all genuine poetry, their works oppose totalization, generalization and standardization and are hard to be appropriated by those who turn art into a commodity in the great culture market as well as those who loudly declare their commitment to a simplifying ideology or a political monolith proving that art is oppositional and questions all hierarchies and all the rigid systems and regimes that produce violence of every kind.

This apocalyptic and symbolic function of poetry has assumed a new urgency in our time that , to me, has been marked primarily by violence in its diverse incarnations. Thedore Adorno, the well- known thinker from Frankfurt once said that poetry is impossible after Auschwitz. The statement, clearly, was not meant to be literal; it was an intense comment on the violence of our times that works against creativity of every kind. Indeed the Holocaust produced its own variety of great poetry: remember Nelly Sachs, Abba Kovner, Paul Celan and several others who still remind us of those ominous days of the genocidal mania. It was about such poetry that the Polish poet Tadeuz Rozevicz had said in his introduction to the anthology of post-War Polish poetry: “…a poetry for the horror-stricken, for those abandoned to butchery, for survivors, created out of a remnant of words, salvaged words, out of uninteresting words from the great rubbish dump.”

The history of poetry in our time has also been a history of censorship, exile and martyrdom. We have the examples of Lorca and Neruda, Nazim Hikmet and Ossip Mandelstam,  Anna Akhmatova and Bella Akhmadulina, Ai-Ching,  and Stu Tao, Shamsur Rahman and Tasleema Nasrin, Benjamin Molois and Kensaro Wiwa, Cherabandaraju and Saroj Dutta, Subbarao Panigrahi and Safdar Hashmi, Najet Adouni and Al Idrisi Kaitouni,  Sepide Jodeyri and Zuhair Kutbi, Wael Saad Eldieu and Adel Labad, Mehdi Moosavi and Muawiya al Rawahi , Saw Wei and Jin I Choi, just to take a few examples,   who had all raised their voice against some form of dictatorship, discrimination and injustice for which they had to suffer insult, imprisonment, life in a labour camp, exile or death. Plato who had kept poets out of his ideal republic should be pleased that he has had several followers in our time: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, Pol Pot, Mao, Pinochet, Id-i-Ameen, Sani Abacha, Ayatolla Khomeini, Saddam Husain and many other champions of totalitarianism and fundamentalism of diverse hues, from Burma, Tibet , Indonesia  and  the Koreas to Russia, China, Iran, Egypt , Syria, Turkey ,Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia, at times even avowed democrats eager to defend the status-quo. They have found their new heirs in many of the present leaders of the world from Trump and Brexit to Modi and Orban, whose power, once free from the democratic system that restrains them to an extent, can be fatal to cultural freedom and every form of diversity. James Joyce once said of writers, “Squeeze us, we are olives”, meaning the writers yield their best under oppressive environments. While it is true that various forms of oppression have produced some of the most passionate poetic works of our time, it is equally  true that they have also silenced a lot of real and potential poets. Brecht was right when he asked, “Will there be poetry in dark times?”, and answered,  “Yes, poetry about dark times”. Remember, in his poem ‘To the Posterity’ he had bemoaned the cruel times when a talk about trees could be a crime since it also carried a silence about so many crimes. We too are passing through a bleak time when all optimism looks facile and the only honest poetry seems to be of despair and  sarcasm.

And yet, whatever the mode of response, it is impossible for the genuine writer today to ignore the violence that threatens to drown our beautiful world. Blood floods our bedrooms and our drawing rooms are strewn with corpses and that is often the blood and corpses  of those who have neither drawing rooms nor bedrooms. Even the ivory towers of pure aesthetes are being swept by the winds of violence and change. Poets can no more be comfortable with ahistoricity, even if they transmute it, as Paz says, into apocalyptic visions.

Violence in our time springs from so many sources. Indeed there are the big and small wars often engineered by divisive forces and imperialist agencies, we have seen, from Vietnam to Iraq to Syria how wars can be conjured up by hegemonic nation states. Tagore had seen Nationalism itself as a violent ideology as it is based on hatred of other nations and peoples than the love of one’s own nation and people and led to a form of collective hubris and greed that inevitably led to direct or indirect war. Today we understand his meaning even better as Nationalism is being turned into a ritual performed under pressure, a form of theocratic jingoism based on othering and discrimination that claims omnipotence.

Another form of violence springs from social inequalities: of class, caste, race and gender. Capitalist violence that emanates from greed and consequent exploitation- “capitalism comes into the world dripping blood’, said Karl Marx-, upper caste violence based on discrimination, denial of opportunities and silencing of historical memory, the violence of the White races against the Blacks and Browns,  non-tribal people  against tribal populations, and   patriarchal violence that takes several forms from linguistic  and emotional violence to the physical one, inevitably produce counter-violence from the victims who try to resist the violence from above; but even counter-violence, however sympathetic we are towards it, is also violence and as Brecht says, even anger against injustice contorts our human features. By now any intelligent student of history knows that violence cannot end violence and “an eye for an eye only turns the whole world blind”, to recall the words of the greatest spokesman of non-violence in our times. We have seen this dark logic at work in the countries that sought to change their destiny through violence: they had to employ greater violence to sustain their regimes until some of them  collapsed for lack of any means to know the truth, why, to know even their own people’s thoughts, as they had silenced  all opposition by brute force- which is blindness of the worst kind.

Another is communal violence, of which we have seen some rabid outbursts in India recently. This happens when religion gets divorced entirely from ethics, from God, if you want, gets congealed into dogma and fanaticism and begins to create a scape-goat, an ‘other’ in its own image held responsible for  every suffering that one endures. It shows patriarchal proclivities, manufactures an artificial tradition and a distorted history dismissing elements that do not suit its design and uses racial symbols and archetypes to appeal to the popular unconscious. Thus it is also a form of cultural and historical violence. This communalism shares with fascism its basic features, what Umberto Eco calls ur-Fascism in his book , Five Moral Pieces, an ideology  that sees dissent as betrayal, defines nation  negatively to the exclusion of minorities thus  promoting xenophobia, fears difference, advocates action for the sake of action, rejects modernism, looks at pacifism as collusion with the enemy, scorns the weak, appeals to the middle classes, encourages the cult of death, upholds machismo as a value and opposes all non-conformist sexual behaviour, treats people as a monolith, derides parliamentary governments, promotes what George Orwell would call ‘new speak’ that sees everything as black and white , and avoids  any kind of intellectual complexity, limits the tools available to critical thinking, fears writers , artists and thinkers  and creates a cult of tradition taking truth to be already known.

Techno-fascism too is a form of corrupt power as it ruins our physical and spiritual environment, exploits the natural resources with no consideration for posterity, pollutes our air, earth and water and imposes on everything the tyranny of the rational, measuring everything in numbers and quantities and rejects all that is incalculable, immeasurable and unsayable-which is the very substance of poetry-as they are impossible to digitize.  It also produces speed that Milan Kundera in his Slowness calls the ‘ecstasy of technology’. The speed of modern life leaves little room for meditation or even the pleasure of reading and writing. He speaks about the need to retrieve that lost joy of slowness, of lying on the meadow, ‘idly gazing at God’s windows’, a joy getting lost in the louder and faster entertainment provided by the machines.

Another kind of violence comes from the market that forces the writer to be loud and to join the bidding in the culture market while art demands subtlety, suggestion and understatement: it is like a subterranean current that slowly works on the foundations, uproots the  status-quoist values and creates new ones. Market is the new Midas turning everything it touches not into gold, but into commodity and artists who answer its temptations are sure to sell their soul to this Mephistophilean spirit since genuine art, by its very nature defies commodification and totalization.

Baudrillard spoke of globalisation as the  “greatest violence of our times” as it imposes cultural amnesia in its victims, forcing them to forget their indigenous traditions in art, culture and knowledge and turning them increasingly into unthinking mimics of the West. Local cultures are the  repositories of culturally learned responses built up over thousands of years from which  poetry often draws its sustenance. Its loss is no less dangerous than the loss of genetic diversity. Western universalism is trying to drown the pluralistic and polyphonic cultural mosaic of countries like India. The agenda  of globalisation is monoacculturation, that is, to homogenise and  standardise cultures whereas difference and diversity are the very soul of many cultures in the East. Globalisation kills languages both through jargonisation and the selling of the monolingual idea. It is more a command from above than a decision from below; it anthropologises culture by reducing ethnicity into a brand name. It is a form of recolonisation that brings back  colonial imaginaries.

Poetry moves from subjects to gestures and is essentially political  not only because of the messages and sentiments it conveys concerning the state of the world  nor only because of the manner in which  it might represent society’s structures or social groups, their identities and conflicts. It is political because of the type of space and time that it institutes and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space. The defence of aesthetics is the defence of imagination, pleasure, sensual and intellectual freedom, curiosity, play, experimentation and openness.  It opposes the capitalist world view by resisting utilitarian co-option: the shape of a poem, cadences, surprises, sounds and spaces cannot be commodified nor taken as booty. Art is anathema to oppressors as it always generates new ideas, forms, desires, possibilities, energies and love of existing in the world.

Poetry opposes all forms of regimentation and invests the quotidian with layers of meaning. Avant-garde poetry is the inscription of the unresolved contradictions between the aesthetic promise and the realities of oppression in the world. It breaks down the obvious orders and unsettles traditional patterns in an attempt to redefine the sensible. It resists simple interpretations..  The aesthetic regime disrupts the boundaries between and redistributes the sense created by other practices. Poetry, by its very nature, interrogates the hierarchical organization of the community and creates experiences that disrupt the results of domination in everyday life.  Poetry contributes to resistance by reconfiguring the realm of appearances  and reframing the way problems have been posed. It contests the way capacities, voices and roles have been apportioned in the existing order. Poetic practices redefine what can be seen and said (as defined by the hegemonic forces that constitute and embody the State) and the implicit estimations placed on the members of communities. They deny the rigid identities stamped upon us by the police order and provokes counter-histories that would offer new forms of experience and exchange between art and life.

Genuine poetry has always opposed violence in its direct and oblique, tangible as well as intangible, forms, and more than ever it needs today to raise its profoundly human voice against all forms of violence, the ones we spoke of and the ones we may have overlooked. Paz had foreseen the contemporary situation: “Reality has cast aside all disguises and contemporary society is seen for what it is: a heterogeneous collection of things ‘homogenized’ by the whip or by propagandas, directed by groups distinguishable from one another only by their degree of brutality. In these circumstances, poetic creation goes into hiding.” Poetry, even with its element of play, is no mere combinatorial game that a machine can play. It is more than a mere permutation of  a restricted number of elements and functions. It always tries to say what it cannot say and its power comes from its willingness to give a voice to what is voiceless and  a name to what is nameless.  It advances on the blank page as Nicanor Parra would say. Poetry becomes important, as Italo Calvino says of literature in general, not when it reproduces established values, given truths or ready-made slogans .It is an ear that hears beyond the understanding of common sociology, an eye that sees beyond the colour-spectrum of everyday politics. It promotes self-awareness through a criticism of the status quo and the cultural and material violence it perpetrates. The truth it discovers may not necessarily be of immediate use, but it is sure to gradually become part of social consciousness It is the undeclared mission of poetry today to retrieve the past without being atavistic, to disentangle the effects of power from representations, to re-establish the almost-lost connections between man and nature, to redefine the boundaries between the self and the other and the self and nature in the context of man’s species- arrogance that cripples the environment as well as his own   moral and spiritual life, to resensitize man to suffering, alienation and solitude and to give positive non-violence and love which is its greatest expression  the central place it ought to have in all human discourse.

Lorca who spoke of the “duende”, that  sudden epiphany , the vision of godhead, the intangible mystery  in the context of Arabic music, also was speaking of the thrill and  terror of  what Paz calls the apocalypse.  But this is not a moment of ignorance, but of awareness of the highest kind, an awareness filled with deep concern for all living things that the Buddha, that great pioneer of the philosophy of non-violence, would have qualified as ‘karuna’ or compassion.

Let me conclude with Paz’s own inspired words before I read some poems as an appendix : “We must find the lost word, dream inwardly and also outwardly,/ decipher the night’s tattooing and look face to face at the noon day and tear off the mask” so that finally we can say, “ I am history/ A memory inventing itself/I am never alone/ I speak with you always/ You speak with me always/ I move in the dark/ I plant signs.”

K Satchidanandan is an eminent Malayalam poet.

First published in Newsclick.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum
 

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