Kolkata: Eminent classical dancer and cultural activist Mallika Sarabhai has spoken up against the “complete destruction of ideals” in the country, also stating ‘Hindutva’ is being shoved down the throat of people in the name of Hinduism.

Hinduism is actually all about asking questions, the 68-year old Padma Bhushan awardee said during a recent session about her life, career and initiation into the world of dance, at the concluding day of the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival here on Sunday.  “What I am witnessing around today completely decimates me… Never had I thought there will be complete destruction of our ideals in India, and so many people blinded by the glory of advertisement and brand-building,” she said.

 “It is so nice coming to Kolkata and actually seeing (people) of different religions living side by side… which I don’t see in a similar way in Gujarat, in Ahmedabad, where ghettoisation seems to be so complete,” Sarabhai said.

She claimed that many of her friends are in jail, facing trial for asking questions, apparently referring to the arrests of some rights activists in recent times. “Hinduism is all about asking questions, as manifested in our scriptures. Unfortunately, it is Hinduism in the form of Hindutva that is quoted to us and shoved (down the throat of people),” the noted dancer said.

Sarabhai, who had portrayed Draupadi in Peter Brook’s play ‘The Mahabharata’ to great acclaim in the 1980s, apart from acting in solo theatrical works ‘Shakti: The Power of Women’ and co-directing ‘Women with Broken Wings’, said Bengal is among the few states where pluralism still exists in society.

 “Kolkata has always given me more love than any other part of the world”.

Woman BJP leader reacts

 BJP leader Roopa Ganguly, reacting to Malika Sarabhai’s strong criticisms about the narrowing down of political Hinduism. said Hinduism is not a religion, but a way of life that is connected to nature. Hindutva is a Hindi word and Hinduism is a globally known English word. That is the only difference between the two expressions, Ganguly, a former Rajya Sabha MP, said.

 “About the ghettoisation comments, shall I ask her (Sarabhai) to go through the population chart of Gujarat and (charts) of all parts of India. As she specifically mentioned Gujarat, I would ask her to check how many people engaged in diamond cutting live there?

 “Many of them are from Domjur in West Bengal and they are living peacefully in Surat.

Related:

“If this be our culture may it perish at once. If this be our sanskriti, may apocalypse come now.”: Mallika Sarabhai

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Image courtesy Indian Express

JV Pawar, eminent historian and co-founder of the Dalit Panthers, says: “If Dhale had not been at the forefront when dalit literature emerged, if he had not stood there with a naked sword in his hand, dalit literature would have been killed in its infancy. Even ‘experts’ on dalit literature agree on this.” Dhale’s collected works were compiled for the first time by JV Pawar; and in 1990, on Dhale’s 50th birthday, the collection was published in a book entitled Astitwachya Resha (The Lines of Existence).This significant book provides insights into Dhale’s meticulous understanding of various subjects, and introduces us to the many unexplored aspects of his personality—the writer, the artist, the literary theorist and the political visionary.

Literary renaissance has one crucial requirement. Old literary values need to be refuted; and new values—that connect to contemporary society and advocate justice in social life, have to be vehemently propagated. For this to happen, an understanding of the relationship between society and literature is essential. Raja Dhale not only had this understanding; he also had the vision to develop it.

Just as “literature is a part of our personality,” says Dhale, “it is part of our existence. This means (that) as literature shapes our existence, our existence shapes our literature.” Dhale captured the objective of literature at the theoretical level. But he did more. He developed the objective into a literary framework to resolve the tussle between Marxism and Ambedkarism. He spoke of this as early as 1976 in a speech delivered at a convention of dalit literature. This speech also marked the arrival of revivalist understanding of dalit literatures, inspired by the thoughts, teachings and literary vision of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. Dhale’s speech shed light on literary aspects which had, till then, been matters of confusion and conflict in Indian literary spheres:

The concept of ‘Marxist literature’ originated from a theoretical understanding of society. But the concept of dalit literature originated directly from lived experience.

Today there are writings which can be said to be inspired by Marxian thought. But there is nothing that can be described as Marxist literature. Because of this, literature inspired by Marxian thought attempts to seize the field of ‘dalit literature’. Therefore, dalit literature should be called the literature of Ambedkar Pranalee (Ambedkarite ideology).

Till now, our literature has been that of Ambedkari (Ambedkarite) ideology. Because dalit literature emerges from life itself, it acquires social significance – which manifests as dalit social consciousness. This social consciousness of dalit life is shaped by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and his battles. Hence the social significance of dalit literature, is Ambedkari.

The vision of dalit literature is infused with its social consciousness – this is why dalit literature acquires social significance. But ‘Marxist literature’ has neither social consciousness nor significance; it has a theoretical significance. Just as its origin is theory, its eventual form too is theoretical, not social. The names Marxist literature goes by underline this. ‘Progressive literature’, for example: which social group does this literature refer to? Where exactly does it lead? Towards the social or the theoretical? Another example is ‘parallel literature’. The term does not clarify which social group and which social consciousness it is ‘parallel to’.

When we call ourselves litterateurs of Ambedkari ideology, and when we describe our literature as the literature of Ambedkari ideology, our objective of social revolution becomes clear. Likewise, our ‘place of work’ is also clear; it is the dalit community…

A skillful artisan gives shape to his artefacts, stroke after stroke, with persistence and patience. Like that artisan, Dhale’s meticulous study of literature and his understanding of theories of art and aesthetics shaped the discourse of dalit literature — which he preferred to call the literature of Ambedkar ideology — and the dimensions of its theory. Logic was never absent from his words– be whether he was writing his literary essays, articles, stories or his few but significant poems. For example, in his poem “Eka Panther Che Manogat”, he says:

Each man is the last one. If he sees that clearly,
why should he not fight each battle
as if it is the last one
I don’t understand it — because the end is decided.
Either the battle will come to an end
Or we will die. 

If death is certain, why shouldn’t
the battle for equality be certain?

As part of social movements, Dhale’s words and actions were directed by his commitment to truth; justice; and the creation of a casteless society, whether in the realm of the imagination or in the real world. His life showed that he never bowed down before power. His literary and artistic talents gained strength from his unique imagination, which, in turn, was fed by Ambedkar’s thoughts and vision. This is why he found his reference in social history, the history of his community, and in the vision of Ambedkar, rather than foreign theories on art, literature and movements. His contributions to literature and art are unparalleled in the legacy of dalit literature. He wrote short stories, literary essays, critical reviews, songs for adults and children, and introductions to books. What he chose to translate is also telling: he translated Zen short stories, Egyptian poems, and poems by African American poets such as Langston Hughes, Samuel Allen and Robert Hayden into Marathi. As for his art, its idea of beauty is not sensual, but charged with sense; with sensibility. His illustrations reveal an artistic sensibility that suggests future directions for the anti-caste struggle. They also indicate why the appreciation of beauty requires the creation of a just and equal world.

Notes:

¹ All translations are by Yogesh Maitreya.
² Pranali Prakashan, Mumbai, 1990.

Read more:
Remembering Raja Dhale: How the Dalit Panthers Planned to Burn Holy Books
दलित पैंथर: दलित अत्याचार के ख़िलाफ़ साझा संघर्ष
Sharankumar Limbale: “Literature that was restricted to a class or a group is now expanding”
Strike a Blow to Change the World

Yogesh Maitreya is a poet, translator and founder of Panther’s Paw Publication, an anti-caste publishing house. He is pursuing a PhD at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

All illustrations are by Raja Dhale. They first appeared in Raja Dhale: Samagra Lekhan Vol 1, published by Lokvangmay Gruh.
 

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“Panditaraja Jagannath, Mughal court poet extraordinaire, a scholar of Linguistics, poetics, and philosophy, hounded by the Brahmin orthodoxy led by Hara Dikshita for marrying a Muslim woman, sought refuge on the steps of Banaras by the side of the Ganga. Forbidden to step into the water lest he pollute the river with his transgression, he was moved to compose his famous devotional eulogy of the Ganga, known as the Piyushalahari. As he composed each verse, legend has it, the river rose step by step, and at the end of his recitation sweeps him and his devoted wife away.”

This is one of the many fascinating stories that Sudipta Sen tells us in this remarkable book, a product of at least 12 years of labor of love.
Rivers are indeed storehouse of millions of tales, and no book can do justice to all the tales a river has to tell. One book can never be sufficient to tell a history of a river, as the history of river would include the history of all the key interactions that a river has had with various living organisms and people. Not the least a river like Ganga.

The author says in his introductory chapter, “This books explores the evolution of this image of a cosmic river at the intersection of myth, history and ecology.” For a river like Ganga, this is a herculean task. It is difficult to judge how far the author succeeds in this exploration of myth and history. But, he does not go far in defining the ecological parameters of the river.

The author starts his journey from Kali Gandaki river, the river older than even Himalayas: “Geologists have been fascinated by the Kali Gandaki and its tributaries because it is the only river that has retained its path through the Himalayan massif.”

In the beginning of this journey itself, the author asks a pertinent question: “How did the Ganga come to assume such a central place in the civilization and culture of the Indian subcontinent?” He may well have asked another pertinent question there itself: if Ganga did assume such a central place in the civilization and culture of the subcontinent, why was the river allowed to degenerate into one of the most polluted and defiled places on earth, its situation worsening during the right wing rule of Vajpayee and Modi?

The author variously describes the river as “a mundane river, repository of accumulated human misdeeds”, “cosmic river”, “one of the most engineered spaces on the planet”, “immaculate and eternal deity of the flowing waters”, “the river of the last resort”, “refuge of the wretched of the earth”, “the iconic status”, “River of afterlife”, “a comfort for the dying”, “the metaphysical threshold”, “the most compassionate mother”, “resplendent necklace on the bosom of the earth”, among many others. It reminds one of the 1000 names that Ganga has been given in puranas.

Some serious limitations For a book published in 2019, one expects it to contain a reasonably accurate account of the key current issues plaguing the river. But the book makes no detailed mention of plethora of bumper to bumper hydropower projects and all the debates around them, the unsustainable sand mining, encroachments on the floodplain and river bed and even the historic 2013 Uttarakhand flood disaster, or climate change impacts already affecting the river.

The whole book is about a River. One expects the author to at least attempt to define the river along with a narrative about various dimensions of a river. The author falls in the familiar trap of using water and river interchangeably. The book may also have benefited from providing map of the Ganga basin to define the changing Geographic contours during different eras.

The author makes a large number of inaccurate, wrong or misleading assertions. For example, he says Farakka barrage was “originally intended for irrigation and flood control”, which is not true, the basic objective of FB was to sustain navigability of Kolkata port.

Moreover, the book makes rather confused statement: “India has defended the viability of Farakka as a safeguard against excessive siltation that has progressively diminished the navigability of the river between Hugli and Allahabad.” In the context  of Farakka, Allahabad does not come in the picture and the stretch between Hugli and Allahabad has seen various adverse impacts.

Similarly, his contention that efforts between India and Bangladesh “have not been successful in reaching a mutually acceptable compromise” does not seem correct in view of the 1996 Ganges agreement that has survived 23 summers without major issues.

For a number of questionable statements, the author does not provide any source or reference, which is a rather disturbing weakness. For example, he states “Some scientists have sounded the alarm that the Tehri Dam added to the minor barrages in Bijnor, Narora and Kanpur, has so accelerated the siltation rate of the Ganga that its lifespan is limited to a meagre forty to fifty year.” The author neither names any source nor any scientist, the statement itself sounds meaningless as it stands.

Similarly, he says the Tehri debate “pitted engineers and technocrats against villagers, devout Hindus, hidden leftists and environmental militants.” He does not clarify source or who is means by environmental militants or hidden leftists. He makes another factually wrong statement when he says, “The (Ganga Action) plan was officially withdrawn in 2000 and a postmortem was done by the National River Conservation Authority.”

These are avoidable mistakes and let us hope the writer qualifies them or corrects them in the next editions.

Political setting The author may as well have noted that it was BJP rule under AB Vajpayee when the Tehri Dam gates were closed rather secretively, without going through due process.

And that it was Congress rule when Prof GD Agarwal (also known as Swami Gyan Swarup Sanand) went on fast at least four times, and government negotiated with him and agreed to many of his demands, each time, he withdrawing fast, whereas under Modi, Prof Agarwal died during the very first fast as the Prime Minister had no time for responding to Prof Agarwal.

The claims of the “Ganga putras” like the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Ministers Gadkari and Uma Bharti about Ganga notwithstanding, there is little dispute that their actions have done enormous harm to the river. As I write this, Swami Atmabodhanand broke his fast unto death for the Ganga on 194th day of fast on May 4, 2019.

The songs and the tales right in the beginning of the book the author mentions the notes from the seventh century Chinese traveler Xuanzang who saw at Ganga-Yamuna Prayag, “hundreds of men fasting for days before immersing themselves in the river for a last ritual bath before committing suicide by drowning.” The strange ritual was ultimately stopped by Mughal emperor Akbar, the author notes.

One is reminded by the author about “the songs and verses of the radical devotional ferment that swept across India of the late Sultanate period, led by figures such as Nanak, Raidas, Dadu and Kabir, all of whom questioned the blind following of prescriptive rituals in normative and orthodox forms of Hindu worship and piety.” Sen goes on to remind about Nanak recording in Adi Granth “about the folly of believing that simply bathing in the Ganga makes one pure”. And about Kabir talking in his famous language of “enigma and paradox” when he says purity is an attitude, a state of mind.

The same water that flows in the roadside nala also flows in Ganga, but the former is not even worthy of being touched. The author notes, “Decades before India’s official independence, the Ganga had already secured its place as the national river”, referring to Poet Iqbal’s Song of India “Sare Jahan se Achha”, written in Lahore in 1903.

At one stage, the author asks a pertinent question that Ganga herself possibly asked Bhagiratha: “And then where would she go to cleanse herself of such accumulated poison?” As Bhagiratha reportedly replied to Ganga, she possibly does not have to go to any new place to clean herself. If truly religious people of current day India, like Panditraja Jagannath and his wife from the story we started with were to stand up for the river. Today we have saints of Matri Sadan, ecologists working on dolphins and turtles, activists working against dams, civil society working against unsustainable sand mining, pollution and environment flows, standing up for the river. But we clearly need more  efforts from all concerned to improve the state of Ganga.

A number of scholarly books have come out in recent years on Ganga. Sudipta Sen’s book is a valuable addition to literature on Ganga, especially for the way in which it connects various historical periods of the river. In spite of its limitations, but the book is a keeper.

But we need lot more scholarly work on our rivers, before the amazing beauty of rivers desert the humanity forever.

Courtesy: Counter View

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Tom Wolfe, in 2010, fired up and holding forth. AP Photo/Tina Fineberg

But Tom Wolfe, who died May 14 at age 88, helped change that in the 1960s. He was one of the New Journalists, who wrote nonfiction using the techniques of fiction.

As an example: Journalists had long been trained to use direct quotations sparingly and to look for money quotes, working them into stories with stenographic rhythm. Wolfe and the others broke rules, using great stretches of dialogue, knowing people reveal their character with the words they utter.

In a business demanding informational triage, Wolfe included obsessive detail, using scene-by-scene construction to observe and describe. “Show, don’t tell” was the mantra. The New Journalists wouldn’t just say “the man wore a pocket protector”; they would examine and describe everything within: Paper Mates, Pentels, Eberhard Faber Mongol 482s.
 

Origin story

Tom Wolfe took an unusual path into the world of journalism that he would so flagrantly disrupt. Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, he went to Washington and Lee University, but did not follow the prescribed English-lit path to becoming a Man of Letters. He majored in American studies, examining the country from the ground up. His mentor, Marshall Fishwick, had students work shifts as brick masons and garbage collectors.

Post-graduation, he sought a career in Major League Baseball. Wolfe had a good arm and was invited to spring training with the New York Giants. He was cut, so he did what people do when they don’t know what else to do: He went to graduate school.
He earned a doctorate in American studies at Yale – yes, he’s been Dr. Tom Wolfe all this time. While he chipped away at his dissertation, he adopted the all-in-black look and body odor of the beatnik, moving office furniture and chatting up young secretaries, hoping one might concede to a date. No luck for the sweaty. So he brooded on the dissertation over beer, manspreading on his couch, watching late-night TV.
 

Stumbling into journalism

Then he saw it: “His Girl Friday.” Being a newspaper reporter looked like fun and after years of academic overload, he longed for the real world. That world with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell looked real enough, and so he blanketed North America with resumes. He got two bites, one of which was a joke offer so the New York Daily News could brag about having a Ph.D. copy boy. (He’d finally finished the dissertation.)

But the other offer was from the Springfield Union in Massachusetts. He took that job and wrote about tax rates and sewer lines. Having paid his dues, he was off to The Washington Post in 1959 and the New York Herald Tribune by 1962.

In the heady competition in New York, he soon developed a fascination with the work of New York Times reporter Gay Talese. Talese spent off-hours writing features for Esquire, which drew Wolfe’s whistle of admiration.
 

Infuriating the establishment

Wolfe wanted to play that game. He covered a custom car rally in California for the Herald Tribune and spun off a free-association feature – actually his verbatim memo about the car rally – into an Esquire article titled “There Goes (VAROOM! VAROOM!) that Kandy-Kolored (THPHHHHHH!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (RAHGHHHH!) Around the Bend (BRUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.”

His style was born of deadline fear and set his course to cover the decade he considered mirthful pandemonium. His writing was freckled with Tourette’s-like ejaculations that infatuated some and infuriated others, including the editors, staff and perhaps every reader ever of The New Yorker. Wolfe’s savage parody takedown of the magazine and its beloved and cloistered editor, William Shawn, drew lifelong hatred from much of the literary establishment. E.B. White called the article “sly” and “cruel” and the reclusive J.D. Salinger called it “poisonous.” Wolfe wore such criticism as a thorny crown.

Tom Wolfe in his trademark white suit, in October 2012 – well after Labor Day. Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

He excelled in annoyance; witness his clothing. When he showed up at an autumn lawn party in his white suit – as a Son of the South, he was practically issued the thing – guests approached him sputtering with rage: “Why, it’s after Labor Day! How dare you?” And so he began dressing with insufferable flamboyance, using clothing as harmless aggression. Even people who didn’t read knew who he was: the Man in the White Suit.

In his work, he wrapped up the spiritual quest of the 1960s in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” his high-octane meditation about a generation born to affluence searching for something beyond the working definition of happiness, a spiritual and physical journey he showed through the eyes of writer Ken Kesey, who’d gone off the rails. Fifty years later, “Acid Test” stands as the best book to give to a kid who wants to know why there is such a fuss about the 1960s.

Then he asked the simple question: What do you do when you know your life has peaked? After walking on the moon, going to Walmart loses its mystique. In the 1970s he investigated for Rolling Stone how the astronauts held up after returning to Earth and going back to normal life. A decade of research followed into the nature of heroism. He produced “The Right Stuff” in 1979.
 

Climbing the mountain

Inevitably – because the mountain was there, demanding to be climbed – he turned to fiction. Using his reporter’s skills and determined to write a realistic novel in the manner of Charles Dickens, he spent a decade – and a very public first draft, also in Rolling Stone – to produce “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” a big best-seller, loathed by the literary community that had always despised him.

I knew him and wrote a book about him many years ago. I was with him during the research phase of one of his novels, and I marveled watching him watch people. With grace and a seeming effortlessness, he extracted stories from people, slipping into a corner to pull his notebook from his suit pocket and dash off a few lines of insight.

He kept it up the last decades of his life, producing doorstop best-sellers (“A Man in Full,” “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” “Back to Blood”) and remaining a chortling televised commentator, sowing disdain and insult like some Johnny Pissed-off Seed.
Tom Wolfe on ‘Firing Line’ in 1975.

He didn’t care for acceptance by the literary community. He knew that would never happen. As an outsider who’d long urinated on the pretensions of much modern writing, he never expected to be invited into the tent.

He left behind not only his work, but validation for the journalists who have followed in his wake. He – and Talese, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer and others – celebrated nonfiction writing as an art form at least as legitimate as modern fiction. When I look back at the sore-thumb decade of the last century, there’s no definitive novel of the 1960s, but there is “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” There is no single novel that spelunks to the depths of the American character, but there is “The Right Stuff.”

In the end, he gave the world the story of 60 years of the American experience, in fiction and nonfiction. Our descendants will decide whether his work has a long shelf life, but today it can be hard to look back and imagine the grand and catastrophic spectacle without him on the sideline, taking notes.

William McKeen, Professor and Chair, Department of Journalism, Boston University
 

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Arundhati Roy, in 2010. jeanbaptisteparis/Flickr” , CC BY-ND

Maybe she does not think of these two jobs as different, but rather as extensions of each other.

This, at least, is the impression Roy gives her readers in her latest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Hamish Hamilton), which came out in early June. Two decades in the making, the book records the story of India as it transpired over those 20 years.

This contemporary history is told and retold by myriad voices: those of hijras, people who identify themselves as belonging to the third gender or as transgender; of a dalit man (of the lowest castes) who pretends to be Muslim; of Kashmiris, of Indian civil servants, cold-blooded killers and puppet journalists; of adivasis (tribal populations) and of artists, of owls and kittens and of a dung beetle named Guih Kyom.

Roy’s second fiction work was 20 years in the making. Penguin/Amazon, FAL

Locales are similarly wide-ranging. Roy takes readers from a graveyard in Old Delhi to civil war-torn Kashmir and to central Indian forests, where Maoist insurgents fight India’s army. Some of the book transpires too in the 18th-century astronomical site, Jantar Mantar, the only place in Delhi where people are allowed to protest.

Those are just a few of the backdrops in this panoramic novel, which touches on the various Indian social movements that have captured global attention in recent years, from the 2011 anti-corruption Anna Hazare protests to the 2016 Una dalit struggle.

Roy uses the internal contradictions of the movements and the locales to mirror her meandering plotlines, which knit all these skeins together into a kaleidoscopic larger narrative.

It’s an uneasy fit, and the book often feels like it is about to burst at the seams. Still, Roy somehow holds it all together, clumsily yet passionately, leaving no one and nothing out.

Old Delhi is among the settings featured in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. © Jorge Royan/ Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
 

Between a graveyard and a valley

Both the margins and the marginalised speak in the Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a feat Roy has also sought to achieve with both her activism and her non-fiction work.

The story follows two characters: Anjum, nee Aftab, a hijra who rejects the politically correct term “transgender”, and Tilo, a Delhi-based architect turned graphic designer who kidnaps a baby from Jantar Mantar.

Anjum’s life is a lens onto an alternate duniya, or world, one where hijras live and learn together, cloistered, following their own rules, regulations and hierarchies.

That changes forever when Anjum travels to Gujarat, a western Indian state that is known for its recent history of religious violence between Hindus and Muslims, and witnesses a massacre. Shortly thereafter, Anjum moves to a graveyard in Old Delhi.

As always, Roy’s brilliance shines most in her choice of locales and the imagery they invoke.

Conflict-beset Kashmir, which Roy has covered extensively in her non-fiction work, features in her latest novel. KashmirGlobal/Flickr, CC BY-SA

In The God of Small Things (1997), the banks of the Meenachil River in southern Kerala served as the space of deviance for the protagonists, where Ammu and Velutha have their escapades and Estha and Rahel get up to mischief.

In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the author gives us two contrasting, contradictory settings: a graveyard that becomes a place of life and the verdant Kashmir valley, a space of death and misery.

Anjum starts a guesthouse in the old graveyard, with each room enclosing a grave. Holding feasts for festivals, she invites her friends over to dine regularly at the graveyard-guest house. Later, Tilo moves in permanently with the baby.

The reader understands this resplendent graveyard, which features not just living humans but an impressive stock of animals too, as an ode to tolerating (or, more correctly termed, to accommodating) plurality, a blunt contrast to the truth of modern-day India, with its increasing intolerance towards religious and social differences.

For this, for trying to etch out a semblance of hope, for showing broken things and shattered people coming together to carve out a niche of their own, Roy deserves applause.
 

Disparate and intertwined tales

At times all these voices, places and problems escalate into a dissonant cacophony that leaves the reader perplexed, exhausted and grasping at the multiple threads of the plot. But the novel’s brilliance lies in how it captures subtle moments, with attention to detail and sharp compassion.

For instance, the Ustad (master) Kulsoom Bi takes Anjum and the other newly initiated hijra residents to a light and sound show at the Red Fort in Delhi just so they can hear the fleeting but distinct coquettish giggle of a court eunuch. She explains to them that they, the hijras, were not “commoners, but members of the staff of the Royal Palace in the medieval period.”

Hijras, or transgender women in New Delhi’s Panscheel Park. R D´Lucca/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

These nuggets of everyday history and poetry keep readers hooked, gradually lowering us through each of the story’s many layers and offering moments of clarity in an otherwise tangled mesh.

Some have called Roy’s novel a “fascinating mess”, but frankly when one decides to write a shattered story about all things, the narrative(s) is bound to get fuzzy.

The book may be difficult for those who have not been following Roy and her causes in the long years since God of Small Things. But those who get her intellectual moorings and understand her role as a voice of dissent in today’s climate of “saffronisation” – the spread of extreme-right Hindu values across India, a nation veering hazardously towards authoritarianism, know that the author and her work are one.

Roy’s novel, much like her role as a public intellectual, is a reminder that the world we inhabit is a composite one – a duniya of duniyas – where invisible people, their unrepresented struggles and their unacknowledged yearnings have the right to exist.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness tells their story, extolling everyone’s right to be heard, even if only fleetingly, in the coquettish giggle of a court eunuch.
 

Malavika Binny, Researcher, Jawaharlal Nehru University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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मेरी समझ से किसी भी वर्ग या वर्ण का लेखक या कवि जनता या समाज के उत्पीड़ित तबकों की कथाएं या कविताएं लिख सकता है। ऐसा करते हुए वह शोषण-उत्पीड़न को खत्म कर सामाजिक-समानता पर आधारित बेहतर समाज केे निर्माण के अभियान में बड़ा योगदान कर सकता है।

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प्रेमचंद के बारे में कुछ ऐसे तथ्य जो ज्यादा लोगों को पता नहीं है-

हिंदी के इस मशहूर लेखक ने अपनी पढाई एक मदरसे से शुरू की थी .

• शुरूआती दौर में यह उर्दू लेखक थे और इन्होने लेखनी की शुरूआत में कई उर्दू नाटकों से करी और इन्होने हिंदी में बाद में लिखना शुरू किया .
• कहते हैं इन्हें उर्दू उपन्यास का ऐसा नशा था कि यह किताब की दुकान पर बैठकर ही सब नॉवल पढ़ जाते थे ।
अपने उपन्यासों और कहानियो के लिए तो सभी लोग इन्हें जानते है पर बहुत कम लोगों को पता होगा की वह साथ ही एक नाटककार भी थे और लोगों का कहना है कि कहानियो से पहले यह नाटक ही लिखते थे
• अंगेजी हुकूमत को इनकी रचनाओं में बगावत की बू आने लगी थी जिस कारण इनकी रचनाओं पर प्रतिबन्ध लगा दिया गया था . इस प्रतिबन्ध से बचने के लिए इन्होने “प्रेमचंद” के नाम से लिखना शुरू किया . .
• वह फिल्मों में खुद अपनी किस्मत आजमाने मुंबई भी गए थे और इन्होने मजदूर नाम की फिल्म की स्क्रिप्ट भी लिखी थी और प्रदर्शित होने के ठीक बाद इस पर प्रतिबन्ध लगा दिया गया था क्योंकि यह मजदूरों को मिल मालिकों के खिलाफ भड़का रही थी

मामूली नौकर के तौर पर काम करने वाले अजायब राय के घर प्रेमचन्द ( धनपत राय ) का जन्म ३१ जुलाई सन् 1880 को बनारस शहर से चार मील दूर लमही गाँव में हुआ था। कहा जाता है कि घर की माली हालत कुछ ठीक नहीं थी जिस कारण उन्हें मैट्रिक में पढाई रोकनी पड़ी और ट्यूशन पढ़ाने लगे. बाद में इन्होने में ग्रेजुएशन की डिग्री हासिल की. तंगी के बावजूद इनका साहित्य की ओर झुकाव था और उर्दू का इल्म रखते थे । उनके जीवन का अधिकांश समय गाँव में ही गुजरा और वह सदा साधारण गंवई लिबास में रहते थे।

काफी कम उम्र से ही लिखना आरंभ कर दिया था और यह सिलसिला ताउम्र जारी रहा । पहली कहानी कानपूर से प्रकाशीत होने वाले अखबार ज़माना में प्रकाशित हुई थी । बाद में जब माली हालात कुछ ठीक हुए तो लेखन में तेजी आई। लोग बताते है कि 1907 में इनकी पाँच कहानियों का संग्रह सोजे वतन काफी मशहूर हुआ था और यही से एक लेखक के तौर पर मशहूर होना शुरू हुए ।
 
सामाजिक रचनाओं के साथ साथ इन्होने समकालीन विषयों पर भी अपनी कलम चलाई और अंग्रेज शासकों को इनके लेखन में बगावत की झलक मालूम हुई और एक बार पकडे भी गए. इनके सामने ही आपकी रचनाओं को जला दिया गया और बिना आज्ञा न लिखने का बंधन लगा दिया गया। इस बंधन से बचने के लिए इन्होने प्रेमचन्द के नाम से लिखना शुरू किया ।

इनकी लिखी लगभग 300 रचनाओं में से गोदान , सद्गति , पूस की रात जैसे उपन्यास और दो बैलो का जोड़ा , ईदगाह , गबन , बड़े भाईसाहब , शतरंज के खिलाडी , कर्मभूमि जैसी कहानिया तो सभी जानते है पर सामन्ती और पूँजीवादी प्रवृत्ति की निन्दा करते हुए लिखी “महाजनी सभ्यता” “नमक” नामक लेख उस समय के सामंती पूंजीवादी समाज का सटीक विश्लेषण है । कई मशहूर निर्देशक इनकी कहानियों पर कई फिल्मे भी बना चुके हैं .

प्रेमचंद के वो लेखक थे जिन्होंने कहानी के मूल को परियों की कहानियों से निकालकर यथार्थ की जमीन पर ला खड़ा किया और वह सही मायने में हिंदी आधुनिक साहित्य के जन्मदाता थे.

The post आज के समय में प्रेमचंद कि प्रासंगिकता –किशोर appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
Published on Jun 29, 2012
Ashfaq Hussain interviews and discusses history, culture, literature and poetry with Bollywood legend Dilip Kumar.  Interviewed in Toronto, Canada in 1985 as part of Asian Horizons (precursor to modern day Asian Telvision Network – ATN).
 

The post Finest Literature was the Inspiration for Our Films: Dilip Kumar appeared first on SabrangIndia.