From Shoka to Shloka in Gujarat

Today, I attended a very interesting lecture on Poetry as Language of Persuasion’ delivered by one of the best living poets of Gujarat Sitanshu Yashashchandra Mehta at Forum of Contemporary Theory, Vadodara. Evoking the epics by Dante and Valmiki, Prof Mehta discussed how poetry is an account of travel and journey. The lecture was organized under the national workshop on ` Towards an Ecology of Knowledge’ by the Forum on Contemporary Theory and Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and other Human Sciences. Prof Mehta was critical of the Indian intellectual’s reliance on the Western paradigms. He advised us not be the ` darlings of the West’ by quoting Derrida etc. He was also critical of the idea of ` General Semantics‘ as being imported. He remarked that the experts in General Semantics’ who had come to enlighten the participants of the workshop would be rewarded if the young Indian scholars would `offer them `our’ riches, as intellectual return gifts’. He then talked of the ancient Indian poetics  and talked about the mythical story of the origin of poetry where Valmiki, the composer of the Ramayana, saw a hunter kill one of the Krauncha birds which were mating nearby. Valmiki , as the legend goes, was so deeply grieved ( shoka= grief) by the plight of birds that he composed the first shloka ( a couplet) of the Ramayana. The inspiration for the epic came from the grief of a bird. Prof Mehta also talked about Auden’s famous elegy on Yeats , quoting the following lines:

 In the nightmare of the dark
          All the dogs of Europe bark,

Prof Mehta pointed out how the poets have to descend the depths of darkness when the dogs of Europe ( like Musolini , Hitler and, Prof Mehta said, Indians would add Churchill) barked ceaselessly.

In the question answer session, yours faithfully expressed his reservations and doubts ( as usual). I said that the whole idea of ` our riches’ is not that simple. Determination of what  is `ours’ is probably as violent as `othering’. Who decides what is `ours’ and who would feel that the `ours’ is not really `ours’, I asked.

I also pointed out that forget the Congress vs the BJP or the notion of activism or of ideology ( the things ,our reputed poet , should not pressurize  a poet to write certain type of poetry). I said even if we stayed within the classical notion of poetry of shloka( poetry)  being inspired by shoka ( grief) of a dying bird, I dont understand why so many poets ( I was not referring to him in particular but many Gujarati poets ) did not find inspiration or feel shoka in the Gujarat carnage of 2002 and write shlokas about it. Instead, I said continuing the Audenesqe analogy,  they preferred to join the Dogs of India in barking. Had Valmiki been alive, he would not have preferred the seclusion of his hermitage in such circumstances. I said that the question was not of ideology but of the poet’s sensitivity.

Prof Mehta, very kindly responded that he like many others had indulged in silences but one should not be selective in protesting. One should not just protest the killings after the Godhra tragedy but also protest the death of people who died in the train, he said. He said we should also protest the plight of Kashmiri pandits who have lost their homes.

I thought to myself how can a person who does not understand or sympathize with  the tragedy of the rape and pregnant women near home can ever understand the tragedy of people living in Kashmir.

A Critique of Judgment and Towards Jaina Theory of Literary studies

Transformation is a way of life according to Landmark Education and I am learning a thing (learning being one of my strong suits) or two everyday. Discussing the problems of relationships with my friends, I discovered how being judgmental is a negative way of being which drains us of vitality and openness. Most of us believe that we are open-minded, but if we just became aware of the things that we consider ` good’, `right’, `wrong’ or `bad’, we discover that we are constantly judging people, situations, things and of course ourselves. At the same time, almost all of us allow other people’s judgment to affect us and influence our way of thinking and being. I believe if we avoid looking at the world in terms of ` good-bad’, `right-wrong’, `proper-improper’, our world view would become very broad.

I was wondering about the conversations I heard during the Forum regarding, ` Must, Is, because’ and ` Always Already Listening’ and I felt I did not quite get them. But I feel today that they about ways of thinking and being which restrict our openness and put constraints on the other possibilities of being and living. Saying that X is like this or Y must … or thinking in terms of `because’ are all based on the perception of present which is based on our past. LM perceives the present from the point of view of the future which is not merely a projection from our past that is our fantasies, anxieties, fears and wish fulfillments etc. Transformation, in LM philosophy is different from change. Change is modification or alteration of what already exists, transformation is invention of a state of being which is not a modification of what already exists.

LM educational philosophy is based on the idea of `transformative education’ instead of informative education and it achieves its aims by focusing on our areas of being, living, and thinking which we did not know that we did not know, as against most of the education system which focuses on what we know we don’t know -we know we cant speak Chinese or how to hack into the Pentagon website. An instance of transformative education unit is the idea that most of us are judgmental thinking in terms of `right-wrong’ etc without acknowledging or knowing that we are judgmental.

With these things at the back of my mind, I was browsing through Crossword bookstore looking for good books on Jainism. Jainism is an incredibly powerful religion and like all great religions, it is based on atheism. Its central value is `aviolence’ (often translated as non-violence) which has to be conceived very broadly. This central value is based on its metaphysics of ` anekantavaada’ or pluralistic view of reality (that is `realities’). The Jaina logic, probably one of the greatest logical systems of the world, is based on seven step syllogism or the Sapta Bhangi Nyaya. This logical system like the notion of `a-violence’ is based on non-absolutist metaphysical outlook of the religion.   The summary of this seven fold logic is first found in the writings of a Jaina monk Bhadrabahu (c. 4^th century B.C,) and goes something like this:

“The syadvada is set forth as follows: (1) May be, it is; (2) may be, it is not; (3) may be, it is and it is not; (4) may be, it is indescribable; (5) may be, it is and yet is indescribable; (6) may be, it is not and it is also indescribable; (7) may be, it is and it is not and it is also indescribable.”

A-violence is possible if your outlook becomes a non-absolutist and being judgmental implies that my view is truth and is unquestionable one, because I am Right and you are Wrong.  In a way, our judgmental view is the source of violence in the world and it limits our world view in a violent way.

Sometime back, I was almost fanatic and dogmatic upholder of the ` evaluative’ mode of criticism and felt that non-evaluative or non-judgmental study of literature as promoted by outstanding critics like Northrop Frye has resulted in certain `anomie’ of values in literary studies department. The judgmental way of reading or being is actually a very limited and violent way of reading. I wonder how a-violent or non-judgmental mode of reading is possible. It is possible by admitting multiple points of views of readers and the characters and the author in the process of reading, in fact, by admitting that all the voices that speak in the text, including the voice of reader, is not  speaking `the Truth’, but ` a truth’ which is a limited one.  Reader response theories admit multiple points of views of readers by asserting that the readers produce their meaning, but there is need for this ethical awareness that even a particular meaning generated by the reader is not the `right one’, but one right reading among the many ones. The potential of this ethical outlook can be radical and can actually go against educational and pedagogical models of literary studies which actually are violent in the fact that they want readers to produce a `particular kind of reading’ in order to get grades. The Syadvaad can be a base of newer ethics of reading and `criticism’. Am I proposing a Jaina theory of literary studies? Probably I am, or probably I am not….Probably it will lead us beyond the conversations marked by ` Must, Is, Because’ and ` Right/Wrong, ` Good/Bad’, ` Correct/Incorrect’ which delimit our views and open up a possibility of radically open mode of literary studies….

Of Gender , Sexuality and other Disasters

One of my friends asked me to chair a session or two at the forthcoming one-day seminar on ` Gay and Lesbian Studies: The Indian Context’ and she said that one of my colleagues had turned down the offer because he was ` straight’ and ` still interested in women’. Not very funny perhaps.

I agreed to the idea even if it was not my area of academic research. The area of gender and sexuality is probably one of the most interesting area of research probably. If someone stupid would ask me why I am poking my straight nose into this queer area,I would reply by describing a scene from a very very funny and interesting film ` Love and Other Disasters’ where Mathew Rhys who plays a gay room mate of Brittany Murphy  and Santiago Cabera go out for dinner as it is `set up’ by Murphy  who thinks that Santiago is gay and sweet for Rhys. Rhys character is obviously shocked when Cabera’s character tells him that he is straight and not gay. Funnily, Rhys’ character asks him ` Straight? Since when?’, to which Santiago says that he is straight since he was eight and however hard he tried to develop interest in men, he would end up with women. The humour is largely due to inversion of the usual situation where it is the `straight’ who would ask such questions to the gay and it would be the gay person who would give such a reply. The point probably is that heterosexuality too is as much a construct as homosexuality is. So my answer would be same as that of Santiagos but at the same time it would betray an awareness that people are not born straight, they become one.

Some years back, I was not very enthusiastic about feminism and gender studies as I felt that the subject was exhausted and that there was hardly anything new in the area. But that simply was my ignorance and complacence. My reading and understanding of feminism and gender studies was limited to the French theorists I read during my post-graduation days. I had a faint idea of something like `the Third Wave’ of Feminism.But only after joining the MS University, thanks to my colleagues like Dr Deeptha Achar, who is an outstanding researcher in this area,  and the DRS SAP programme which organized seminars,colloqiums and workshops on the questions of Identity,  I got interested in the area of gender. We had find scholars like Prof Nivedita Menon and Prof Jasbir Jain in our Dept.

Besides my renewed interest in Wittgenstein enabled me to appreciate the work of theorists like Judith Butler in a new light. Just like Wittgenstein challenged the idea of ` transcendental meaning’ which exists independently of speech acts or specific language use, we can challenge the idea of any such transcendental notions of gender existing independently of the specific language-event. That is gender, like most of other things, can hardly exist outside of specific performances, outside of ` language games’. This is obviously not exactly what Butler is talking about, but my way of reading her is from a Wittgensteinien perspective.

I also protest the idea that someone should be punished and discriminated against just because they are  different. Difference is not a disease. There is a huge amount of variation even within the categories perceived as monoliths like ` heterosexual’. No two heterosexuals have same sexual expressions and at the same time even a single heterosexual can express herself or himself differently over a period of time or in different context. Consider what is a state termed euphemistically as `sexual dysfunction’. A person sexually dysfunctional with a particular person may function `adequately’ with another. Sexual expression is inseparable from relationships ( which means it is always socially conditioned).It is in such a huge range of variation of sexual expressions, that one should locate the terms such as ` heterosexual’ and ` the homosexual’. The binary terms are not really water tight compartments nor are they `homogeneous’ or monolithic, There are homosexualities and there are heterosexualities.

In Indian context, homophobia most commonly manifests itself by equating homosexuality with anal penetration. People forget however, that anal sex is not limited to homosexuality but a part of common heterosexual practices too. Besides, patriarchal outlook delimits homosexuality to male sexuality and has no ways of understanding female homosexuality.
( more to come..)

Dionysus in Gandhi’s Ahmedabad

Dionysus is not exactly a Gandhian God. He is the god of cruelty, excess, orgy and transgression. Restored to the Western pantheon in 1872 by Fredric Nietzsche, chiefly in order to blitzkrieg the dominant values of the Western Civilization, Dionysus presides as the chief deity of modernism. The Greek God whose philosophy is `excess of anything is good’ counters both the Christian ideas of moderation and self restraint as well as the bourgeois ideology of `excess of anything is bad’. Monroe K Spears’s book `Dionysus and the City’ (1970), whose title I have stolen for the title of this article, examines the relationship between the Nietzschean Dionysus and the context of urbanization in the development of modernism in the west says,

` Dionysus presides metaphorically over most of the recent trends in theater, from cruelty and absurdity to audience participation, nudity, and the tribal rock musical. On and off the stage, he is apparent in two contemporary figures: the black militant, violently releasing dark and repressed forces both in society and within psyche, and the rock musician, with his female devotees and his orgiastic cult of collective emotion.’ (1970: 35)

Professor Spears in his insightful analysis points out that the word City etymologically comes from the civitas, city-state, which is properly an aggregation of cives, citizens and the term civilization too comes from the same root. As a poetic trope, it stands for both the city within and the city without. Professor Spears, drawing upon ideas from Walter Pater’s essay ` A Study of Dionysus’, comments that modernism began when Dionysus entered the city. In earlier times, Civitas Terrena or the Earthly City was seen as striving towards a Heavenly City, Civitas Dei, but for moderns, says Prof Spears, it is seen as falling or fallen and moving towards the Infernal City the City of Dis, the city of Dante and Baudelaire, and of Eliot. In short, when the modernist poets paint the city in dark and sinister colours, they are in many ways censuring and negating the process of urbanization as well as the entire foundation of civilization, they are criticizing the city within and without. If modern city stands for modernity, then modernism, as a cultural movement often stands in contradiction and negation to modernity.

However, the relationship between the city and the village is crucial not just in analysis of modernism, but also for entire literary historiography and historical analysis of culture as demonstrated by Raymond Williams’ seminal book ` The Country and the City’(1973). Giving a lucid and rigorous analysis of shifting values, perceptions and associations of the opposition between the country and the city as embodied in English literary history, Williams remarks that this contrast,` is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society’. (1973:289). He argues that capitalism, as a mode of production, is the basic process of most of what we know as the history of country and city. He cites Marx and Engels from the Communist Manifesto where they say, ` the bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns…has created enormous cities…has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones.’ (1973:303).

Williams, in spite of being a Marxist, is critical of the idea implicit within Marxism and socialism, the avowed enemies of capitalism, in their perception that the city is more `advanced and progressive’ than the country because the industrial capitalism is a more progressive than the feudal capitalism. However, what is important to us in our analysis of the relationship between modernism and the city in the Indian context is Raymond Williams’ awareness of relevance of this thesis to cultures beyond the British and the western culture. He is aware of the fact that the historical process he is studying is `now effectively international, means that we have more than material for interesting comparisons. ‘(1973:292)

While it would be illuminating to examine the imagery and sensibility associated with the urban experience in the modernist Indian poetry, I would be delimiting myself to Gujarati. The meaning of the term modernism is indeed ambiguous and contested; however, I would characterize modernism as a sense of discontinuity with tradition and rebellion against established artistic and ethical norms. The earliest glimpse of modernism in Gujarati poetry can be found in Niranjan Bhagat (b.1926)’s ` Pravaal Dveep’ or The Coral Island. The poems are centred on the experience of the megapolis called Mumbai and exhibit influences of the western modernist poets like Eliot and Rilke along with Tagore. Among the famous contemporaries of Bhagat is Suresh Joshi (1921-1986). A lesser-known contemporary of Bhagat is Hasmukh Pathak (b.1930) also exhibits early modernist sensibility centred on the urban experience. In `Saherni Ghadio Ganta..’ or Keeping a count of time in the city, he uses a typical modernist metaphor:

` and the evening ( with lipstick decorating her lips)

Kisses the streets and lanes;

Hundreds of mercury lamps dance to the Jazzy beats,

And fires find their way into gutters.

The orphaned dreams wandering and lost at midnight

Weep for a while and turn silent.

While Mumbai has played a very significant role in formation of modernist sensibility in Gujarati and Marathi, it would extremely interesting to see how the city called ` the Manchester of the East’ Ahmedabad emerges from Gujarati modernist poetry. Ahmedabad or Ahmadabad is the largest city in Gujarat and the sixth largest city in India with a population of almost 5 million. The city is also sometimes called Karnavati , an older name and as Amdavad in colloquial Gujarati . Ahmedabad is the administrative center of Ahmedabad District, and was the former capital of Gujarat State from 1960 to 1970, when Gandhinagar replaced it.

One of the most famous poems on Ahmedabad is a ghazal written by `Adil’ Mansuri (b.1936) one of the rebellious Gujarati poets who had to leave Ahmedabad, his homeland. Mansuri was associated with the avant-garde `Rhey Math’, a group of rebellious poets based in Mumbai. He is also credited with introducing modernist sensibility to Gujarati ghazal. The ghazal in question here is romantic and looks at the city he is leaving in a sentimental fashion.

You might never see it again

This city playing in the sands

You might never catch a glimpse of it again

On the plains of your memory

Fill up its fragrance in your breath

You might never catch the scent of its wet earth again

Ahmedabad emerges as an idyllic Eden from which Adam and Eve are driven away. The ghazal ends with romantic idealization of the motherland:

Let me rub the dust of my homelands to my forehead, `Adil’

Who knows I may never see the dust in my life again.

However, not all are so sad to leave Ahmedabad or mind losing the so-called ` Paradise’:

Ahmedabad

Manilal Desai

Only in the eyes of the camels, you find compassion in Ahmedabad. Humans don’t have eyes at all. Walking on the hot tar roads, cataracts have covered their brains. I too live in Ahmedabad. I live in Ahmedabad too, and a translucent film has started to envelope me. The air conditioners of Niroz and Quality restaurants struggle to breathe in the Bhatiyar lane. The lane, however, casts shadows of the whores of Maninagar. The sands of Sabarmati have spread over every street of Ahmedabad, and the roads wait to be inundated with frenzied floods. It wasn’t for fishing by the river, did Gandhi build Sabarmati Ashram, nor was it for dallying with the Ahmedabadi dames coming for a bath here. He, in fact, wanted to procure an auto-rickshaw for Ahmedshah, who happens to drive a cycle-rickshaw here. But Ahmedabad can’t think of anything other than spitting on the tracks of Balwantrai Mehta’s car or banging its head against Indulal Yagnik’s cap. Yesterday, the horses of Ahmedabad neighed in the tombs of Sarkhej- tomorrow, Adam will ask, ` What have you done with the feelings I gave you?’ and I will take hold of the finger of a shoe-polish boy from Lal Darwaja who has agreed to polish shoes for a paisa, and run away from Ahmedabad.

Only camels are capable of compassion in Manilal’s Ahmedabad and the speaker is scared that he too will turn callous by living here. The poet flattens out the history and makes a collage out of it. Mahatma Gandhi ‘s Sabarmati Ashram for the speaker is built because Gandhiji wants to buy an auto-rickshaw for Ahmed Shah, the founder Sultan of Ahmedabad of the fifteenth century, who happens to be slogging on a cycle rickshaw here. History has reduced the glorious Islamic emperors to cycle rickshaw drivers. The resplendence of the Sultanate is reduced to poverty. Yet Ahmedabad does not care and given a chance the modernist Adam, unlike Adil’s Adam prefers to flee Ahmedabad holding the finger of a shoe polish boy from Lal Darwaja. Manilal’s Adam is more concerned about turning thick-skinned in Ahmedabad.

Manilal Desai (1939-1966) belongs to the later generation of modernist Gujarati poets, which include poets like Labhshanker Thaker (b.1935), Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh (b.1937), ) Ravji Patel (1939-1968), Chandrakant Sheth (b. 1938) , Chinu Modi (b.1939) and Sitanshu Yashashchandra Mehta ( b.1941). What is most important here is the experience of metropolis and urbanization pervades their works in terms of imagery and sensibility. Sheikh, for instance, has many surreal sequences based on the cities like Delhi and Mumbai.

Gandhi’s Ahmedabad is no longer the land of non-violence and peace. In a poem called ` Maru Shaher’ by Chinu Modi, we find Ahmedabad behaving in more of a Godseian way:

My City

Chinu Modi

You won’t find any fog here anymore

Even if every mill is shut down

No heart melts here anymore

The city exhausted of serving Gandhi

Violently seeks vengeance in innumerable ways

My city: Ahmedabad

They measure your shadows

Not bodies

To stitch clothes;

Here you have to live like bugs

On borrowed breath

Roads are of tar here

And sunlight black as tar

Falls here

My city: Ahmedabad

This city is an old man

Groaning with constipation

This city is all the fancy aerobics

Of a back broken spider

It’s a museum of fallen stars

A grand crematory

Incessantly

Incinerating corpses

My city: Ahmedabad.

Tomorrow a rabbit

Will prey on a dog

Will reduce my honour

To ashes

Who knows what sins of my past life

Is this city avenging?

I cant forego it even for a moment

And it doesn’t let me live

In peace even for a while

O Ahmedabad

Why did you become Karnavati again?

Why don’t you become Aasapalli?

Ahmedabad is neither the `Manchester of the East’ nor is the land of ahimsa. The mills are closed down and like Manilal’s Ahmedabad, it gives a damn for it. The city is exhausted of serving Gandhi and seeks vengeance with incredible violence. The poem written in 2001, which compares Ahmedabad to a `grand crematory constantly burning the corpses’ is indeed sinisterly prophetic. We can feel reverberations of the Post Godhra carnage in it. Like Manilal, Chinu Modi too flattens out history in a form of collage and uses plenty of allusions to historical legends surrounding Ahmedabad. The line about a rabbit preying on a dog is the story associated with the Sultan mentioned in the Manilal’s poem who is famed to have founded the city of Ahmedabad on the Hindu city of Karnavati after he saw a rabbit chasing a dog in that place in 1411 AD . The poem ends with the speaker moaning the return of the Hindu Karnavati and asks why Ahmedabad doesn’t become Assapalli again. Assapalli was the kingdom of a tribal king by the same name, which was conquered by the King Karnadev I of Patan in the eleventh century. Chinu Modi wants the Dionysus back in the city. The primitive tribal kingdom of Assapalli stands for the Eden, which was destroyed by so-called civilized Hindus. We can fruitfully compare the longing for tribal past in Chinu Modi’s poem with Manilal’s wish to escape dangerous side effects of being an Ahmedabadi and contrast it with Adil Mansuri’s sentimental application of Ahmedabadi dust to his forehead.

However, the experience of urbanization and city life is not limited to what EV Ramakrishnan (1995) in his very important study of modernism in Indian context has termed `High Modernism’ or individualistic and elitist modernism, but is also crucially present in what he calls the later avant-garde or collectivistic or subaltern modernism. The Dalit movement in Marathi was largely Mumbai based or based in the city. In Gujarati too, Dalit poetry has taken a note of the city and its discontents. One can cite a poem by Sahil Parmar, a Dalit Gujarati poet:

AHMEDABAD 1974 AND 1984

Sahil Parmar

The outstretched sky plays its own tune

Scattered stars

Flicker feebly

Like the squeaking whistles

Of cloth mills razed by fire

The horizons hazy

Due to the suppressed sobbing

The moon is pulverized

One…two…three…ten…a dozen fragments

Falling upon this city

Crushing

Millions of people

Millions of eyes

Millions of dreams

Under them.

This city is now a crematory of dreams

Darkness like a cemetery

Wrings this city

Before I choke

I can only say

`That hostel mess bill was a very big event indeed!”

The poem, like the poem by Chinu Modi calls the city insensitive to the closing down of the mills in the seventies. Like Manilal’s poem, it accuses the city for shattering people’s dreams and lives. Like Modi’s poem, it uses the metaphor of crematory for the city. Like the other two poems, this poem too interweaves historical references into its metaphorical fabric. The last line alludes to the event of the price hike in the hostel mess bill in LD Engineering College in February 1974, which resulted in an outcry and a strike by the students. The strike snowballed into the famous Nav Nirman Movement, a mass anti-Congress agitation to remove the then Chief Minister of Gujarat Chimanbhai Patel. JP Narayan movement backed up the Nav Nirman Agitation. The poem, as the footnote says in his collection, commemorates the event.

We can see that the modernist Gujarati poetry articulates voices of dissent and alternative notions of Gujarati culture and identity by employing the trope of city and the poetic material drawn from urban experience. The poems by Chinu Modi, Sahil Parmar and Manilal Desai protest against the established culture by voicing their anguish caused by the urban experience of Ahmedabad. The perceptions presented in the poems are critical to the predominant ideas of `culture’. The poems are rebellious and anarchic like the presiding deity of modernism, Dionysus. Modi’s poem is more direct in its Dionysian longing to return to the primitive tribal kingdom and its anti commercial stance (They measure your shadows/ Not bodies/To stitch clothes). The poems are also full of images of morbidity, darkness and decadence. Unlike Adil’s ghazal which is `pretty’, the modernist poems about Ahmedabad are often ugly (consider Chinu Modi’s metaphor of ` This city is an old man/ Groaning with constipation/ This city is/all the fancy aerobics/Of a back broken spider…). These poems interweave references to historical references like Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmed Shah, Karnavati, Assapalli and the Nav Nirman Movment with legends like the rabbit that chased a dog and dense surreal metaphors of darkness, pulverised moon and surreal humour of Ahmed Shah driving a bicycle rickshaw. The images are anarchic and subterranean.

Raymond Williams notes that ` the key cultural factor of the modernist shift is the character of the metropolis. (1990:166).’ What Prof Williams says about the Modernism in the West has implications and uses for us too. The examination of urban experience is crucial for understanding the Modernism in Indian languages. This article is a concise attempt to do so and a beginning of a more elaborate research project. It reveals that The City is a crucial trope in the modernist poetry as the cities like Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Mumbai have played a formative role in moulding of modernist sensibility in Gujarati. It briefly examined the tortuous affiliation of Indian modernism to its urban context with a specific reference to a handful of modernist Gujarati poems by poets like Adil Mansuri, Chinu Modi, Manilal Desai and Salil Parmar dealing with Ahmedabad. I sought to demonstrate how these poems intricately weave history, sociology and politics into their dense fabric to articulate multiple and often dissenting perceptions of cultural history of Ahmedabad and by extension Gujarat.

Notes:

All translations in the article are mine. The poems of Adil Mansuri, Manilal Desai and Hasmukh Pathak are taken from ` Adhunik Gujarati Kavita’ ed. Suresh Dalal and Jaya Mehta, Mumbai: Sahitya Akademi 1989.I am grateful to my friend Piyush Thakker for procuring a copy of Chinu Modi’s poem for me. Sahil Parmar’s poem is from his collection `Mathaman’, Self published, Gandhinagar, 2004.

WORKS CITED

1. Dennis Walder ed. Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990

2. EV Ramakrishnan, Making It New: Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi Poetry’, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1995

3. Monroe K Spears, Dionysus and the City: Modernism in Twentieth Century Poetry, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970

4. Raymond Williams, Modernism and the Metropolis. In Walder ed. 1990, p.166

5. ————————-The Country and the City, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

6. Sahil Parmar, Mathaman. A collection of Gujarati poems. Self Published. Gandhinagar, 2004

7. Suresh Dalal and Jaya Mehta ed. Adhunik Gujarati Kavita’Mumbai: Sahitya Akademi 1989

The article appeared in New Quest, Pune, June 2009

The End of Higher Education in `Swarnim Gujarat’

In an unprecedented move, the Govt of Gujarat has decided to implement the Sixth Pay Commission pay scale instead of the University Grants Commission( UGC) Recommended Pay Scale to the university and college teachers. This means that their salaries will be at par with bureaucrats and govt officials. In no other states has the state government flouted the UGC norms so openly and with such impunity. The move can seen as a strategic back door implementation of what is known as Common University Act, an Act apparently made to bring about uniformity in Higher Education but also to reduce `burden of higher education’ by promoting privatization and commercialization of higher education. The whole game is to encourage ` Self- Finance’ educational institutes and contract based appointments of the teachers and discourage granted and subsidized education. Not that anything is grievously wrong with the concept, but the problem lies in the way it is implemented. The way the State Govt took teachers for granted and penalized them is outright unjust. No other state in the country seems to follow this ` Gujarat Model’.

The roots of problem in Gujarat do not just lie in the present economic situation, but also in the politics of Mr Narendra Modi and his admirers. One of the smartest manipulators of media, Mr Modi knows that he will get admiration even if he is demonized by media and his detractors and so he uses his media generated persona to float ` airs’ of various sorts. Swarnim Gujarat is one such brain child. Swarnim Gujarat or Golden Gujarat has succeeded in creating a belief that all is well in the state of Gujarat and not just that this is the Golden Period.

Gullibility is one fundamental trait on which politics all over the world survives and thrives. Gujarat is no exception. Teachers and intellectuals probably are the most gullible people in the country today. Family members of the people who died drinking illicit liquor in Ahmedabad and the family members of children killed by Tantriks in the Asharam Bapu Ashram know that there is no such thing like Swarnim Gujarat . Neither do the family members of people killed in the Post Godhra riots and various minorities buy the idea of Golden Gujarat. It is not just that insignificant and ideologically impotent political party called ` Congress’ which dislikes the state under Mr Modi, it is also a fairly large number of people in the BJP who hate Modi and his coterie. With the present decision of the Govt, Mr Modi might probably lose many of his admirers among teachers and he doesn’t care about it. For, as long as you have the media,you don’t need any other propaganda machinery.

The best part of this crisis is it provides the much needed ` reality check’ to those who live out-of-sync with present times. Teachers and academic institutions are reputed for completely being out of touch with the actual world outside and these kinds of blows bring them back to normal.

The title of this entry ` The End of Higher Education’ is deliberately ambiguous. For the ` the End’ can mean the final collapse and it can also mean ` the ultimate purpose’ behind Higher education. This is for the second or third time I am participating in teachers agitating against the govt in my short career of 13 years. The question is, why does the society and its representatives think that higher education is dispensable and insignificant ? Why is it that if the teachers go on strike for routine administrative things like the implementation of pay commissions are not seen as creating any serious problems for society? Teachers not going to work is no big deal for society. One needs to ask why. I have seen many highly reputed educational institutions, like other institutions of the society, completely shattered and biting the dust. Most of them have become ` by the mediocre, of the mediocre and for the mediocre’, where loyalty to the authorities has actually become ` merit’. Probably this is because of the large scale upheaval caused by the forces of globalization and economic liberalization which went on a rampage after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The present economic recession has brought this bull-in-the china shop machine of globalization to a grinding halt.

This moment of crisis is indeed a moment of agitation and resistance to contemporary fascism bred on omnipresent media but it is also the moment of introspection: we have to find out what is the ultimate purpose and function of higher education in very specific and concrete terms and then restructure our institutions on its basis. This is the quest for ` the true end’ of Higher Education in Gujarat and probably in India too. The post-Cold war ideological vacuum, which resulted in the disappearance of critical discourses from public life, was filled up with regionalism and fanaticisms of all kinds in the past two or three decades. One of the most important functions of higher education in India today is to promote a critical form of cosmopolitanism which resists fanaticisms of Modi-Raj Thakeray and so many others politicians world over, by restoring critical spirit to its public domain. It would mean moving out of the walls of colleges and universities directly into public spaces. And given the possibilities of new medias like the internet with its social networking sites, blogs and other platforms, I think the teachers of today need to do their critical ` extension’ activities on such platforms. This might mean , apart from the usual academic seminar- research publications, the teachers would do well to reach out to the places where young people really are, apart from classrooms- that is in the space opened up by the internet.

The post-colonial thinking looked at how the idea of nation was `imagined’ and `constructed’ in the times of print media. The post global contemporary culture has created newer ways of creating communities with the help of social networking and blogging and hence a newer way of `imagining’ nation which is NOT primarily based on regional and local cultures. Globalization which people once thought would bring about the end of nation has actually resulted in newer ways of inventing nation and hence newer nations. It is in the context of this newer ways of imagining nation and culture that higher education in India and elsewhere will have to find out its true ` end’.

Of Leadership and Politics: A Gandhi Jayanti Reflection

It requires a certain amount of maturity to understand Gandhi. Very often people who hate him and people who convert him into a `saint’, fail to understand Gandhi. Both of them start from the wrong end- his `ideology’. Even I did the same and was cynical of him. It is so very easy to be cynical of Gandhi. It is so very difficult to understand him, but then it is so very easy to appreciate his greatness. He had only action, commitment and practice. His ideology is merely an attempt to explain what he was trying to do and hence of little consequence to him. His action was his ideology. What he was doing is crucial to us, and once we understand what he was trying to do, we realize why is one of the greatest leaders of all time.

He was trying to see how far is it possible to commit oneself completely and thoroughly to welfare of the society. He tried to become the person he was committed too by wearing clothes like him and living life like him. It is this commitment and complete sense of responsibility to his society which makes him the greatest leader ever. Understanding Gandhi will make us aware of the difference between a politician, a saint and a leader.

The politician is the person who wants power and sees responsibility as a burden. He takes up responsibility for gaining power. The leader is a person who takes up responsibility. The leader is a person who commits himself to the other. Power becomes a means for fulfilling the responsibility for the leader. A leader, because he commits does not require power because this commitment makes him powerful. A Gandhi does not require a post to be powerful. Unlike a saint who insist that you follow him, a leader dedicates himself to you. Thats why Gandhi was much more than a saint or politician.

We need Gandhi today is not because of his abstract ideas of truth, non-violence or like . We want Gandhi because we want to learn how to commit ourselves to the society we live in. To dedicate ourselves completely to others. The society we live in in the twenty first century teaches us how to be completely self-centred and non-committal, which results in extreme powerlessness of the individual.

Gandhi teaches us that we can become powerful only if we dedicate ourselves to others. We want power without responsibility, consequently we can only be weak. If we take up responsibility, we are already powerful we need not `desire power’. You don’t become powerful by desiring power. It is precisely when we give it up the lust for power that we become powerful- this is the Zen of Power, this is the Koan which Gandhi personifies.

Of Anonymity Crisis and Hendiadys

We, as the part of the Dept of English, under the DRS SAP-I programme had organized lectures and a workshop on 18 and 19 Sept 2009 to conclude a series of colloquia dealing with the theme of Identity which we had organized over the past six month. We had Prof Aniket Jaaware from University of Pune and Prof Nivedita Menon from JNU New Delhi. Students were quite enthusiastic about the whole thing and I too learned a couple of things from this very productive workshop.

I was fascinated with Prof Jaaware’s guest lecture ` Language and Duplicity in Hamlet’ which though was not part of the theme of the workshop was extremely insightful and lucid. Prof Jaaware shifted the focus away from the traditional approaches to Hamlet which have largely focused on his ` delay’ in murdering his uncle to the use of language in the play. Prof pointed out that this was one of the most verbose plays and there was just too much language and people simply talked too much.

One of the preoccupations in the play as Aniket rightly pointed out was the verbal duplicity and linguistic manipulation of discourse. He drew attention to how Hamlet manipulates words of Polonius and Claudius by twisting them in different ways. Aniket noted that the idea of duplicity would also include `dualness’ and talked about how there was often an extra character – for instance `Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’ and `Voltemand and Cornelius ‘ . Aniket also talked about an essay by a noted Shakespearean scholar GT White which focuses on a figure of speech called `Hendiadys’ in Hamlet. The figure expresses a single idea using two nouns instead of a noun and its modifier e.g. `He drinks from the cup and gold’. Aniket also noted that the whole idea of delay is only in the mind of Hamlet himself and the critics. No other character is concerned with this problem in the play, not even the Ghost. Hence, the center of duplicity is the figure of Hamlet himself.

Aniket’s other lecture was very interesting too. It addressed the question of Identity and the notion of difference. He focussed specifically on the problematic relationship between identity and anonymity with reference to the urban armed resistance. Though armed resistance is about assertion of identity, in the urban context, it uses anonymity in a strategic ways. He said that the fictive identity ( fake identity cards, ration cards, fake driving licenses etc) are to treated very seriously and to be considered almost ` authentic’ as the armed guerrillas in the cities cannot afford to be caught for ` improper parking’. Hence the politics of armed resistance in the cities uses a very different kind of identity politics where the `real’ identity is often concealed and the fake one is treated as if its authentic.

Prof Menon spoke about the politics and predicament of feminism in contemporary India. Her presentations were extremely lucid and thought provoking. I had not acquainted myself with some of the key ideas of the third wave feminism. My reading of feminism was restricted to the French theorists. After Dr Deeptha’s presentation in one of the earlier colloquia and after Prof Nivedita’s discussion, I am definitely interested in this area.

Yours truly discussed Aniket Jaawre’s essay ` Eating the Dalit and Eating with the Dalit’ ( see K Satchidanandan ed. Modernism and After, Sahitya Akademi). I shared my apprehensions about confusion in the essay arising out of unclear distinctions between ` Varna’, ` Jati’ and `Untouchability’. I also pointed out the confusion arising out of lack on emphasis on the distinctions between ` modernism’ and `modernity’ in the essay as leading to a certain misunderstanding of the historiography of the post-independence Marathi poetry.

The workshop was inaugurated by the respected Dean of Arts faculty. During his inaugural speech he called Rajan Barett my colleague by the name `Dr. Sachin Ketkar’, not once but thrice.
It was befitting of the workshop organized around the theme of identity. While making my presentation on Aniket’s essay , I introduced myself as Dr. Rajan Barrett. The respected Dean of the Arts faculty, with his harmless lapse of memory had ushered in an ` anonymity crisis’ of sorts in me. Taking away Rajan’s identity had resulted in the loss of my identity too. I suggested to Rajan that we have now start resembling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the department. He said that we should rather be called the grave-diggers. I wonder whose skull are we going to find under the ruins now. Is it Yorrick’s skull?

RETRIEVING THE SIXTIES:A UNIQUE ACADEMIC EXPERIMENT

We, at the Department of English, MS University, are doing a very interesting and probably unique academic experiment under the aegis of the UGC DRS SAP-I project. Our Dept is granted this project to research the ` Identarian Movements in the Western India in the period 1960 to 2000′ by the University Grants Commision. This year we started a translation project called `Retrieving the Sixties: Culture in Gujarati Periodicals in English Translation’. The most interesting part of this project is that around 60-70 undergraduate and postgraduate students of English literature in our Dept are translating articles from Gujarati periodicals which had appeared in the decade of the sixties. The articles range from ones on literary subjects and problems of working women to tatooes, and our students were excited and happy about the idea. The students will work with teachers to finalize their work and we hope to publish it in future.The first stage of the project was the Translation Workshop we had on 29 Aug and it was great fun. The bright idea was Deeptha’s and probably what we have on our hands is unique as far as the Dept of Englishes go. The Depts of English are notorious for their lack of direct engagement with immediate cultural environment ( some even complain that they are apathetic towards ANY cultural environment). We seek to remedy it by having teachers and students engaging actively with Gujarati culture.

The Sixties was a culturally exciting decade for many cultures across the globe. Think of the Vietnam War, the Hippies, the Chinese aggression and linguistic formation of the states in India. It was also the moment of Little Magazine Movements of varied sorts.This decade was also momentous in Gujarat. Various issues and debates of this significant phase of Gujarati cultural history are reflected in various periodicals. We felt it is important for the present generation of students to reconnect and reengage with the multiple currents that shaped Gujarati culture of this decade in order to understand some of the key issues of our own time. Translation of articles, which appeared in the sixties, can be a stimulating mode of retrieval and negotiation for the present generation of Gujarati youngsters.

In the post-Globalized world, it is imperative how we `read’ the history of twentieth century to understand ourselves. In this light, I think the project becomes a very interesting one.

Some Philosophical Propositions ( for a change)

1 The Real is what is meaningful.

1.1 Meaning is produced by thinking

1.2 But thinking is not produced by thinking.

1.3 Thinking is neither meaningful nor real...

2 Reality is distinct from existence.

The existentialist slogan, `existence preceeds essence’, makes sense when we see that essenses are actually constructs of human thought and language.

3. `A Thing’ becomes `Something’only because of human thought-language.

4. Being of being preceeds human thought but it is only through language that being can become something

Journeys into the Invisible World: A Personal Footnote to my Poems

When I start messing around with words and the diverse kinds of effects the words are capable of producing, a poem begins like a beginning of an unplanned journey. My poems are excursions into the enigma of being in this world. The world I alone inhabit overlaps with other worlds. However, these worlds are neither concentric nor the same. Exploring the creative possibilities of the language and the self, the poems journey into the worlds not easily visible to others. In the following write up, I attempt very briefly, at the risk of sounding a swellhead and vain, to discuss to some of the contexts and try to understand for myself how they have shaped my poetry directly and indirectly. I will think aloud about my poetics and creative process and how it is caught up in other social, cultural and historical processes around me.

Poetry is essentially an exploration and a journey. `Accident’ and `chance’ have a very crucial role in my poems. My poem cannot afford to take a preconceived pattern of ideas and emotion as a point of departure and `express’ them. This is the reason why it often ventures into anti/a social and the darker regions of my being and emerges with the things that often startle me. A dark undercurrent of anguish, nightmare, and asphyxiation flows under the involved and startling pattern of images in my poems. I discard the traditional and established notions of `poetic’ in the context of Indian culture and seek to stretch the definition of poetry itself. One of the frequent techniques I employ is of keeping my dark and startling discoveries `open’ to multiple interpretations. This way I attempt to interweave the private and public, personal and political, subjective and objective, individual and universal contexts into composite textiles called poems. I want my poems to discover and create things that were unknown to me. I have often asked myself: what is the relationship between my poetics and politics? What is relationship between what I write and where I write from? Where is my poetry in the culture I inhabit and where is the culture in the poems I inhabit?

Cultures are gleaned on geography: colours of the earth, trees, and animals, colours of people, smell of their songs, their food, and fascinating wilderness of our souls. The seashore, dense greenery and dark landscape of Valsad, a small coastal town in South Gujarat, where I was born is an essential part of my consciousness. I am second of two children of a Maharastrian Chitpavan Brahmin who migrated to Gujarat in the sixties. Displacements and dislocations are really replacements and relocations. I call up the famous quote attributed to Hugo, Abbot of St. Victor, 12th century: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land [perfectus vero cui mundus totus exilium est]”. With due apologies to Rev Hugo, I am far from perfect.

Unlike Vadodara, where I live and teach today and which is almost an island of Maharashtra in Gujarat, the environment in which I grew up was completely Gujarati. Marathi was the language we used at home and Gujarati everywhere else. I completed most of my schooling from `English Medium’ schools at Valsad and obtained my BA from a local college in 1990. When you have English as a medium of instruction in India, you end up with inadequate knowledge of any language. The term `English Medium’, is bit of a joke in the average schools of small towns, it means that your knowledge of English is `medium’- not good, and not bad.

Though Valsad is a semi urban town, it bears witness to the large-scale movements of globalization and privatization. It saw, like many cites and towns across the country, the extremely rapid process of unplanned urbanization. It witnessed how colossal industrial township of Vapi rose to its heights at one time and then underwent harrowing recession later. It also witnessed the Cola Wars and a wave of information technology in the form of the Internet and mobile phones. In the post-Emergency period, Valsad, Gujarat, and India have also seen bureaucratic corruption becoming a norm rather than an exception, a systematic and accepted arrangement rather than a clandestine act. We also witness how politics and public sphere are becoming deeply criminalized. Ironically, the land of Gandhi became the laboratory of politics of religious hatred. Gujarat witnessed unprecedented communal riots in the history of Independent India. How has this changed society affected my poetry? The sense of despair and helplessness that pervades my poetry is connected, not just with personal grief and frustration but also to this social predicament. Unlike others who believe in rhetoric of progress and enlightenment, in a truly post-modern sense, I harbour deep scepticism about all grand narratives and metanarratives of progress, equality, liberty, fraternity, salvation, and what not.

In school days, I developed a lifelong companionship with chronic loneliness, chronic asthma, and poetry -along with pubic hair. Poetry usually springs from such things. Suffering, as we all know, is the only true universal context of poetry. The physical and emotional suffering from my illness and the resulting sense of humiliation, loneliness, and inferiority has played an important role in miscreating my writing. The chronic asthma and associated respiratory illness have encompassed my being to an extent that it touched almost all aspects of life. I coughed like a mutilated silencer of motorbike. Along with all these things began the anguish of a chain of one-sided crushes. Deep down within, I had fallen from my own eyes. I have lived inside a dark well, partly of my own making, and partly out of my destiny. The school life for me was suffocation and a sort of nightfall. I found myself turning into a misfit, loner, and a shabby introverted boy with atrocious handwritings. My notebooks began from both the sides- on the back pages I doodled around and drew caricatures of the things I loved drawing the most- the dogs, the Mickey Mouse and a fat bald man with a cigarette in his mouth. When I was a kid I loved to draw. I remember drawing the scene from a movie called `Mahabharata’ and to the amusement of people, the scene was of `Draupadi Wastra Haran’- The Stripping of Draupadi. I used to draw on the floor and the walls. I continued to paint up to my BA days and due to some unknown reason, I stopped painting and concentrated on poetry.

In 1985, for a year, I had been to Warora, a small town in the Vidarbha region of Maharastra, as my father decided to do honorary social work at Anandwan, a renowned organization founded by Baba Amte a noted social worker for service of leprosy patients and the tribals. I wrote some of my very early jejune poems in English and I remember Baba Amte’s comments on one of my poems: your son will not become a doctor or an engineer. Most of my poems were obviously juvenile and shabby.

In the school syllabus, for the first time I encountered what people call `literature’. The English Canon, especially the Romantics- Blake, Shelley, Keats apart from Milton, Shakespeare and the rest of them, enthralled me. I don’t think this impact has worn out even today. Obviously, what I wrote was bad and some of my rather kind-hearted teachers went through it and even encouraged me to continue writing. I wrote in English because English was the language in which I first encountered `literature’ and at the same time English was the only language I could write. I was also fond of translating and I even tried my hand at translating nothing less than Shakespeare’s soliloquies and Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri into Hindi! The choice of Hindi as a target language will puzzle many, but for me, then, it was a compelling choice. Hindi was the only Indian language, I could write a little bit tolerably in those days. Besides some sort of Hindutva ideology, which promoted Hindi as the true national language, did influence me. It was in air in those days in Gujarat. Retrospectively, I have seen how such `airs’ are manufactured. Gujarat was `laboratory of Hindutva’ in those days. I have witnessed how religious hatred is fanned and exploited for political gains. But the rhetoric of hatred thrives in a culture nourished on bogus and baseless values.

I went to Vadodara for my MA and I discovered significant twentieth century literatures and the philosophies of literature. The seminal Western modernist writers like Stevens, Eliot, Kafka, Holderlin, Yeats, Kundera, Dostoyevsky, Sterne, Brecht, Faulkner, and O Neil bedazzled me. I was baffled and wonderstruck by the audacity and rigorous scholarship of the influential critics of the later part of twentieth century. The Continental and Anglo Saxon literary theory bewildered and captivated me. These years were crucial to the development of my sensibility. This experience modernized my creative writing and I experimented with very `unpoetic’ images and pictures in my English poems. Many of my poems included in `A Dirge for the Dead Dog’ belongs to this period. Vihang A. Naik, one of my friends and batchmates is a very active poet and used to arrange for poetry readings in the Department. My English poems in the collection are experiments to evoke my experience of bewilderment and astonishment of living in this world. They have a rather freakish and offbeat texture and it is mainly due to my conscious attempt to capture the immediacy and freshness of this experience. At times, I allowed myself to indulge in the image, simply for the sake of image .In spite of the experimental nature of the craggy poetic language, each of my poems in `A Dirge’ is a record of a distinctive type of pain- a pain that cannot be explained in any other terms. In many of my poems, Vadodara city with its university domes, old campus buildings, hostels, students, railways, bus stops, loneliness, despairs, and desires make their presence felt. This presence goes far beyond mere depiction of the places: it is an integral part of my sensibility. These are also poems of a small townie trying to come to terms with the city.

In Vadodara, I started writing in Marathi mainly out of curiosity, and due to influence of Dr. G N Devy, a reputed scholar and now a noted social activist, who taught us at the postgraduate programme. His book `After Amnesia’ made me reflect upon the question of my identity and `roots’- thankfully, I now realize that there is no such thing like `roots’- all roots are inventions and constructs and even myths. One cannot appropriate one’s past completely, one can only do it strategically. Yet identities are `package deals’, even if you select only a part of tradition/past, you bear the burden of the entire package. I have seen worst side of the politics of identity in the rise of communalism, casteism, regionalism, and linguistic chauvinism. But this idea made me turn to Marathi as language of poetry. I discovered to my pleasure that I could use Marathi more imaginatively and creatively than English. Even then, I don’t think I can agree with the dogma that one should write only in ones first language. But one has to agree that plenty of hype is associated with Indian writing in English, thanks to its metropolitan social base and colonial history. I am terribly bored of the hackneyed themes of exiles, diasporas and the NRI stuff that is staple of most of the `reputed’ Indian writing in English, especially fiction. After reading Kundera, Grass, and Marquez, I have always wondered why a writer as derivative in style as Rushdie would be worshiped in India and abroad.

My Marathi poems were modernist right from the beginning and the conventional, clichéd and sentimental poetry repulsed me. Maharastra, not unlike other Indian states, is a fairly large-scale industry of such hackneyed and stale `poetry’ and its output is in tonnes. At times, I feel fortunate not to study Marathi poetry in school. Right from the beginning, I found that most of the celebrated poets in Marathi like Kusumagraj, Mangesh Padgaonkar, Indira Sant, and Vasant Bapat used Marathi language and poetics that belonged to Jurassic Age, of course, without its primitive splendour. Marathi as a literary language was an acquired language for me and I read whatever appealed to me in Marathi. I enjoyed Narayan Surve, Sadanand Rege and Dilip Chitre. Marathi that I used at home was the language, which came closer to the standard Marathi, and so I lacked a living contact with various rich dialects and slang. In short, my location and upbringing deprived me of language variety. Interestingly, the language, which I inherited, was a strange concoction: a potpourri of Ratnagiri accent/dialect (the region to which my Father belongs, southern coastal region of Maharastra) and strange lexical items Kannada language variety from Belguam (the city on the border of Maharastra and Karnataka), the place where my mother was born and brought up. Besides, many Gujarati-isms had also crept in over a period. The linguistic proximity between Gujarati and Marathi was more of a headache for me, as many a times I was unsure whether a certain word is Gujarati or Marathi.

I got a job as a lecturer in English in an undergraduate college at Navsari, another town near Surat. I completed my doctorate in translation studies from the South Gujarat University, Surat. I was extremely happy to get involved in the things that always fascinated me: translation and poetry. I translated around one hundred poems of Narsinh Mehta, the great fifteenth century Gujarati poet into English for my thesis-by-translation. This research had a definite personal and political dimension to it as perhaps all research has , in spite of the claim of unequivocal `neutrality’ and objectivity’ usually associated with the term. As a Maharastrian, born and brought up in Gujarat and into the profession of teaching English literature and language, I discovered that translation is a way of making intimate ties across languages, cultures, historical periods, and across regions. Translation becomes one the strategies of relocating oneself in the complex cultural and linguistic topography of Indian society. The research into the pre-medieval Indian literature, its poetics, its politics, and its sociology was also a quest into a very crucial phase of the evolution of the modern Indian languages, cultures, and identity. Besides, being a part of English Studies establishment, this research bore testimony to certain dramatic reorientation of academic values, priorities, and attitudes long associated with traditional `Eng.Lit.’ academia. The very recognition of translation as a valid area of research and that too of a medieval Gujarati poet into English is possible today due to the heightened awareness of historical and political contexts in which English or Western literatures and the respective canons were produced, consumed, circulated, and promoted. Multiple cultures, languages, ideologies, and socio-cultural contexts are in built in my small humble personal history. Translation comes naturally for a writer working in such a context. Translation became one of the ways I can relate various multiplicities creatively. In our country, I feel every writer is a translator. I don’t see translation as a necessary evil invariably involving the `loss’ of the original. Rather, it is a creative act-a metaphorical act as one sees one language, culture, and text in terms of the other. Translation is also a negotiation with a world that is many times invisible to the readers.

Later, after my post graduation, I continued reading the great Latin American writers, poets like Paz, Neruda, Marquez, and Borges (whom encountered first in my MA). I gormandized Michel Benedict’s surrealist anthology. Surprisingly, not many people are aware that most of the seminal texts we consume are translations. During the years after MA, apart from plenty of literature on translation studies and the bhakti literature which was part of my Ph.D., programme, I read the Dalit poetry, lot of Marathi poetry. When I was about to visit the Great Britain in 2000, I read contemporary British poetry: Hughes, Plath, Dylan Thomas, the Movement, the Group, the Martians and the newer ones. I discovered that after Hughes there was very little striking poetry being written in the Great Britain. There was very little `excitement’ and `kick’ in the lines I read. Most of them lacked genuine inventiveness, passion, or vision and read more like drab verbal puzzles. This may be due to the overdose of `writing programmes’. Unlike Marathi where the poetry factory was run by amateur lyricists, creative writing programme’ wallahs ran the poetry factory in the UK. Therefore, the staple of poetry written in either country was terribly boring.

I also read the modernist Gujarati poetry and found Ravji Patel, Shitanshu Mehta, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Suresh Joshi, Labhshankar Thaker and Manilal Desai exciting. Yes, their poetry has influenced mine. Unlike Marathi, contemporary Gujarati poets don’t seem to cherish or appreciate this brilliant heritage. They seem to be carried away by the `ghazal’ culture. The materials and contents of the ghazal form seem to be very resistant to change and an avant-garde shift in these things would mean the loss of `ghazaliat’. Dilip Jhaveri , Kamal Vora and few others poets are writing good poetry, but over all the scenario of poetry in Gujarati does not appeal to me much.

I was also interested in science and we started Vigyan Vivek Vartul, a small informal club with friends to promote science and scientific temper in Valsad. I enjoy popular writers on science like Stephen Hawking and Stephen Jay Gould. All this reading emerges in my writing and many times in unrecognized and unrecognizable forms. I also attempted to generate some sort of interest in serious poetry among the young people around me by forming a short lived `poetry circle’. I could arrange some poetry readings at Navsari and Surat. The enthusiasm of the people involved in these activities died down slowly.

Almost a decade of working as a college teacher, by no means a considerable period, I was fortunate to roll my passion, profession, and hobby into one. I could reread Shakespeare, Eliot, and Derrida and discover things that I had not discovered before. Besides, I also was paid for it. So many times it happened that the poet, critic, student of literature and lecturer grappled with same problem and the discovery or insight for one would benefit the other within me. I could interact profitably with a very intelligent minority of young minds and experience the social reality in the sea of inarticulate faces coming from rural areas.

I returned to the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in May 2006, this time as Reader and often feel that I have left my Navsari and Valsad years far behind. However, they are with me, they are in me. Most of my students and colleagues are urban and come from a different social space. Baroda has liberated me more than once from the stagnation and has given me wings.

The best thing, however, to happen during my teaching years at Navsari is the friendship with a well known and brilliant Gujarati short story writer and novelist Nazir Mansuri. I admired his sharp intelligence, his study, his passionate and single-minded commitment to his art. I saw him write thousands of pages of fiction in the college and revising his longish fiction seven to eight times. His understanding of the technique and craft simply amazed me. His ardent defence of autonomy of art is something of an inspiration to me. We have long and meandering discussions on the various aspects of a writer’s craft, writer’s place in tradition and society. Translating and publishing Nazir and Mona Patrawalla, his wife and a very accomplished short story writer, has been a very illuminating experience for me. What I learnt that most of the publishers and the readers in English came from urban and metropolitan background and therefore could hardly identify or appreciate authentic depiction of distant rural ethos. The translations of such stories involved long glossaries and notes in English. Besides, I learnt that the high profile publishers of English fiction in India had appalling knowledge of literary techniques and the craft. They would change paragraph breaks, omit lines, swallow, and rewrite sentences so that they would `read better’ in English as if these things were arbitrary in the original text. They hardly realized that an image, a description, paragraph sequences had a significant function in a work of fiction. This is probably because other writers in Indian languages, hungry for fame, would compromise with these things or that they could hardly read English. This is probably also because the publishers and readers of English fiction in India belong to a class that has hardly anything to do with the real Indian society. It may also be so because this class of users of English are not yet out of the colonial mind set.

Along with Narsinh Mehta, I also translated contemporary Marathi and Gujarati poetry into English. What I translated, again, was determined by my personal location: that of a Maharastrian living in purely Gujarati ambiance and environment. I was not in touch with the younger generation of Marathi poets writing seriously and creatively until I came in touch with Abhidha Nantar group and Shabdavedh group only in December 2002. Before that, I translated whatever little I came across and whatever appealed to me. I translated poems of elderly and lesser-known poets whom I knew personally. I translated poems of a bahujanwadi colleague Narsinh Parmar `Ujamba’. Narsinh Parmar’s were politically committed until recently. Some of his poems were good and I translated them into English. Ideologically, he was a severe critic of the brahmanical establishment as well as Dalit literature. He considered Dalit literature as equally casteist. His personal history is very interesting too. He came from a poor family and he was affected with polio. He worked as porter on a railway station. He studied for MA with Gujarati on the railway platform. He loved to interact with major Gujarati writers of his youth like Suresh Joshi and used to meet them personally. I came into touch with another senior Gujarati poet Mangal Rathod. I translated some of his poems into English. I won Poetry Translation Prize for Gujarati poetry awarded by Indian Literature, the journal of Sahitya Akademi in the year 2000. I had come into contact a senior Marathi poet Gopal Redgaonkar from Nashik. I used to correspond with him regarding various aspects of poetry. In spite of the fact that he wrote sentimental lyrical poetry in the fashion of noted Marathi poets like Kusumagraj and Grace, he appreciated my works, which were so unlike his. I translated some of his poems, which I liked. I also interacted with the critics like EV Ramakrishnan and Sudhakar Marathe regarding poetry. Prof. Ramakrishnan commented on the excessive use of abstractions in my poems and Prof. Marathe found that my poetry somehow do not communicate. He said unless they are purely imagistic, which many of them were, they should contain at least a small hint about what they were about. He drew my attention to an excellent essay by TS Eliot -`Three Voices of Poetry’ regarding the problem of poetic communication.

I translated from English to Marathi too. I had a good fortune of being a part of team translating an anthology of contemporary British writing New Writing 7 published by the British Council into Marathi. I discovered that I could not do justice to much of the work due the fact that the resources of Marathi language I had at my disposal were limited. It was almost a second language for me. Thanks to the encouragement and the guidance of the veteran translators like Prof. Kimbahune, Prof. Pradeep Deshpande and Prof. Sudhakar Marathe, I improved as a translator into Marathi. What I admired about these senior scholars was the extraordinary insistence on precision of interpretation of English words and the meaning of Marathi. Prof Marathe, I remember, talked about the dearth of recourses for a person translating into Marathi: good dictionaries, thesauri, glossaries technical glosses and the like. As a translator I find that this indeed a serious problem I guess this must be a problem even in many other Indian languages. Marathi that I used at home was the language, which came closer to the standard Marathi, and so I lacked a living contact with various rich dialects and slang. In short, I was deprived, mainly to may location and upbringing, of language variety.

During the final years of the millennium, I ran into a very dynamic group of Marathi poets of my generation associated with Abhidha Nantar Magazine from Mumbai and Shabdavedh from Buldana. These periodicals ceased publication in 2009, after fulfilling a very important cultural function. These poets were struggling to come out the shadows of the modernist Marathi poets and trying to come to terms with the changed social reality that lay in front of them. I feel my mature Marathi poetry owes much to this group. It honed and fine tuned my sensibility and allowed me to see what I should be doing and what I should avoid doing in poetry. This helped to inculcate a historical awareness of the context of Marathi poetry. My meeting with Dilip Chitre, our own `renaissance man’, in Pune had a healthy effect on me. It helped me to clarify my own perspective about the contexts of contemporary Marathi poetry. I lacked all these things chiefly due to laziness, but also due to distance from Marathi society, culture, and literary traditions. Abhidha Nantar and Shabdavedh came from two different geographical and cultural locations: one is metropolitan, urban and the other rural-the categories so significant to any understanding of Indian culture and society. Abhidha was itself closer to the Euro American- modern and post-modern poetry and its emphasis on individual, and Shabdavedh was closer to post colonial quest for indigenous traditions (nativism), and the communal spirit. These poles were not always dialectically related. It was my fate to stand in between these two worlds like the amphibian fate of a translator. I belonged to both these spaces. The common point between the two magazines was the desire to do something different from what has already been done: both by the conventional `popular’ poetry and the counter-conventional modernist poetry. Yet it is not simply the desire to be different for the sake of difference, but the desire to make poetry more relevant to the changed social and cultural environment we inhabit.

Like most of my fellow poets, I have often asked myself: What is the relation of `tradition’-that is what has already been done- and our individual talent? I recall the well-grounded advice Eliot gave in his celebrated essay with a corresponding title in the beginning of last century to the poet: he should be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. The materials of poetry have changed. Historical sense- the sense of what has already been done and its relation to the individual talent remains the essential question for the poets writing today. I have used and abused terms like Spam, SMS, or Virus for my metaphorical and symbolic purposes. The grammar of poetry hardly changes, what changes is its timbre, texture and content. I have written a poem about archaic linkage between the primitive cave paintings, cyber-pornography, and graffiti on public urinals, and how I feel alienated from the entire temporal narrative that connects the drawing of fertility goddesses with cyber porn. The themes of sexual frustration, alienation, lack of self esteem might be eternal, but I realized how they are interwoven into the semiotics of contemporary culture. Globalization has altered what Yurij Lotman terms as ` Semiosphere’, we inhabit and if our poetry has to have any contemporary relevance it has to recognize its intertextual relationship with this semiosphere. This altered semiosphere was ubiquitous in the metropolis when the little magazines like Saushthav, Shabdavedh and Abdhidhanantar took off. Today, I think this altered semiosphere is unavoidable even in the villages. So when I translated and edited an anthology of contemporary Marathi poetry titled ` Live Update: An Anthology of Recent Marathi Poetry’ published by Poetrywala, the English imprint of Abhidhanantar in 2005, I divided the contemporary Marathi poetry into two visible clusters based on the location of the poets: those who were located in the metropolis and those who were based in non-metropolitan and largely rural spaces. I also commented on the `digital divide’ and the `rural-urban’ divide in the introduction.

The relationship between the two clusters of contemporary Marathi poetry deteriorated after the publication of the anthology and resulted in a full-fledged mud-slinging match. The group of poets and critics based in non-metropolitan locations accused the metropolitan poets and critics of lacking in social commitment and celebrating globalization uncritically. I intervened often by repeating that the metropolitan poetry of as much a product of cultural and social crisis resulting from globalization and the accusations were not based on careful reading of metropolitan poetry. The great globalization wars in contemporary Marathi poetry reflected the biases and prejudices between metropolitan/cosmopolitan space and non-metropolitan/ `native’ space. The senior critics were roped into the mud-slinging matches and they did an equally bad job by not substantiating their positions with actual reading of the specific texts of metropolitan poetry. New little magazines like Navakshar Darshan and Aivaji were started by the people who were once with the Abhidha and Shabdavedh. How was I located on the divide? I asserted my position by opposing the simplistic jingoistic poetry and by saying that the poets should primarily be committed to poetry. I also criticized the superficial fashionable `dot.com’ poetry and the `breaking news’ school of poetry which used the buzzwords from the world of internet and cell-phones to appear `contemporary’. Belonging to neither worlds, I saw that both the positions were reductive, naïve and even irrelevant. However, what I regret today, that in trying to make my position clear, I became too irreverent, vicious and contemptuous, which was uncalled for and today I apologize to the people and journals I insulted.

I have always believed that the creative act is a political and social act. Art is deeply political, not because it expresses a set political ideology or a party programme, but it because it interrogates simplifications, reductions, clichés, and the ossified ways of seeing and thinking. It involves risks that are not merely social or political but also emotional. The tinkering with words has its own dangers and pleasures. When one tinkers with words, one messes around with all the things that society has considered sacrosanct: ideas, images, worldviews, ideologies, cultures, selves, and others.

These are the personal, geographical, social, cultural contexts to my poetry and they have affected its materials and the worldview. These multiple contexts are interwoven into the fabric of my poems. However, I refuse to see poetry as a merely representational form of art. I believe that poetry does more than just reflect its contexts, personal or social. It is not merely a reflection of the world, either` subjective’, or `objective’, it is also a creation of a world. The world of my poems is the invisible world I inhabit, the world that is not simply my personal property and the world which does it exist independently of me. But just because it is my world, it does not mean that I know its geography and my poems are the journeys that I undertake in search of my enigmatic destiny and destination in this world. And at some crossroads, I meet you.