Partial Recall Essays on Literature and Literary History

PARTIAL RECALL BY THE SAME AUTHOR Essays on Literature and

Poetrv Literary History

Nine Enclosures Distance in Statute Miles Middle Earth The Trilnsfiguring Places

Translations

The Absent Traveller: Prakrit LOZJCPoetry from the Girhisaptaiati ofsatavahana Hala

Songs of Kabir

Edited Books

Twenq Indian Poems The Oxford India Anthology of Tiir,elz~eModern Indian Poets Periplus: Poetry in Translation (with Daniel Weissbort) An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English The Last Bungalow: Writings on Allahabad Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar PARTIAL RECALL BY THE SAME AUTHOR Essays on Literature and

Poetrv Literary History

Nine Enclosures Distance in Statute Miles Middle Earth The Trilnsfiguring Places

Translations

The Absent Traveller: Prakrit LOZJCPoetry from the Girhisaptaiati ofsatavahana Hala

Songs of Kabir

Edited Books

Twenq Indian Poems The Oxford India Anthology of Tiir,elz~eModern Indian Poets Periplus: Poetry in Translation (with Daniel Weissbort) An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English The Last Bungalow: Writings on Allahabad Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar Published by PERMANENT BLACK 'Hirnalayana', Mall Road, Ranikhet Cantt, for Ranikhet 263645 Vandana and Palash [email protected]

Distributed by ORIENT BLACKSWAN PRIVATE LTD Bangalore Bhopal Bhubaneshwar Chandigarh Chennai Ernakulam Guwahati Hyderabad Jaipur Kolkata Lucknow Mumbai New Delhi Patna

ISBN 81-7824-3 10-5

Typeset in Agararnond by Guru Typograph Technology, Dwarka, New Delhi 110075 Printed and bound by Sapra Brothers, New Delhi 110092 Published by PERMANENT BLACK 'Hirnalayana', Mall Road, Ranikhet Cantt, for Ranikhet 263645 Vandana and Palash [email protected]

Distributed by ORIENT BLACKSWAN PRIVATE LTD Bangalore Bhopal Bhubaneshwar Chandigarh Chennai Ernakulam Guwahati Hyderabad Jaipur Kolkata Lucknow Mumbai New Delhi Patna

ISBN 81-7824-3 10-5

Typeset in Agararnond by Guru Typograph Technology, Dwarka, New Delhi 110075 Printed and bound by Sapra Brothers, New Delhi 110092 Contents

Introduction

Descendants Partial Recall Death of a Poet Mela

I I The Bradman Class The Emperor Has No Clothes Towards a History of Indian Literature in English Looking for A.K. Ramanujan Street Music: A Brief History What is an Indian Poem? Translating Kabir

Bibliographical Note Introduction

Br~adl~speaking,my two preoccupations in the essays that follow have been the nature of the multilingual imagination and the invisible web of connections that lies beneath a literature, the stories that are hidden behind tHe stories we read. The two preoccupations, which really are one, are guided less by a desire to interpret the pattern in the carpet than to understand how it came to acquire the shape it did. While my writerly soul has travelled through realms of gold, the body, for at least part of the time, has been immured in Allahabad. Three of the essays, 'Descendants', 'Partial Recall', and 'Mela', are glimpses into this other world that I've inhabited. 'Towards a History of Indian Literature in English' ends with the examples ofwriters who, when they looked in the mirror in the hallway, saw more than their own smiling faces staring back at them. I. Allan Sealy saw Henry Derozio, Nirad Chaudhuri saw Toru Dutt, Salman Rushdie saw G.V. Desani. I had hoped that the awareness of their precursors shown by these writers would lead critics to explore the idea further. A decade after writing the essay I realize that this was wishful thinking on my part. A literaryland- scape is made up of much more than isolated works of literature; it requirescritical scrutiny, intelligent encouragement, and credible evaluation, but there is such a scarcity of these that the Indian one looks more barren than ever before. If there are any productive 2 Partial Recall Introduction 3 intellectual communities living in the scrub, whether nomadic or which, if he happens to be an authority accustomed to command settled, freelancers or attached to universities, they've kept them- respect on literary matters, misleads by its error and strikes at the root selves well hidden from view. of all excellence. The great betrayal of our literature has been primarily by those A year later the subject was still on his mind, only this time he who teach in the country's English departments, thc academic broadened the scope of the attack: community whose job it was to green the hillsides by planting them with biographies, scholarly editions, selections carrying new But while books and newspapers aredaily pouring from the press, the introductions, histories, canon-shaping (orcanon-brealung) antho- quality of our current literature is by no means proportioned to its logies, readable translations, revaluations, exhaustive bibliographies bulk. In fact, by far the greatest part [of]what is published is absolute devoted to individual authors, and critical essays that, because of rubbish. There are several modern Bengali books of which we shall the excellence of their prose, become as much a part of the lite- have to speak in terms of high pyaise, but the number of these is so ratureas any significant novel or poem. Little ofthis has happened. small in comparison with the mass of publications yearly vomiced Writers die, are mourned by other writers, and the matter ends forth by the Bengali press, that they go but a little way towards re- deeming the character of the whole. . . .The case ofcriticism is worse. there. A year goes by, then a decade, and nothing appears to tell We can hardly hope for a healthy and vigorous Bengali literature the reading public why the author deserves to be read and how he in the utter absence of anything like intelligent criticism. ('Bengali fitted into the larger story of a literature to which he spent a Literature') lifetime contributing. Whether it's Srinivas Rayaprol, or Nissim Ezekiel, or A.K. Ramanujan, or Dom Moraes, or Arun Kolatkar, What Bankim said about the state of Bengali literature in 1870 orAgha Shahid Ali, or G.S. Sharat Chandra, or Gopal Honnalgere, could be said about many Indian literatures, particularly the one or Kamala Das, or Dilip Chitre, to mention only the poets, the in English, in 20 1 1. Books continue to daily pour from the press story's been the same. And the dead writer is now rwice dead. Ifwe and some of them are reviewed. The reviews here, unlike reviews can't read or rediscover our contemporaries, what chance of doing elsewhere, seldom connect the title to anything that's been done this for our classics? previously in that genre by others or by the same author. Reading 'Intelligent criticism may be said to be a thing unknown to the them, you'd think that the book had emerged from a litkrary Native Press', bemoaned Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya in 'A nowhere, which it hasn't, though headed for nowhere, 'in the utter Popular Literature for Bengal' (1870): absence of anything like intelligent criticism', it certainly is. The first few weeks in which the reviews appear are, for the book, like There is some inherent defect in the Bengali character which renders the task of distinguishing the beautiful and the true from the gaudy the first few weeks of a newborn's life. This is the period of rampant and the false a task of even greater difficulty than the higher effort infanticide, a time when books are killed not by hostile reviews but of creation. This deficiency in the culture of the cultivated Bengali by meaningless ones. This happens all the time. The review of reacts on the literature. The blundering critic often passes a verdict, an Oriya novel in the literary section of The Hindu of 6 August 2 Partial Recall Introduction 3 intellectual communities living in the scrub, whether nomadic or which, if he happens to be an authority accustomed to command settled, freelancers or attached to universities, they've kept them- respect on literary matters, misleads by its error and strikes at the root selves well hidden from view. of all excellence. The great betrayal of our literature has been primarily by those A year later the subject was still on his mind, only this time he who teach in the country's English departments, thc academic broadened the scope of the attack: community whose job it was to green the hillsides by planting them with biographies, scholarly editions, selections carrying new But while books and newspapers aredaily pouring from the press, the introductions, histories, canon-shaping (orcanon-brealung) antho- quality of our current literature is by no means proportioned to its logies, readable translations, revaluations, exhaustive bibliographies bulk. In fact, by far the greatest part [of]what is published is absolute devoted to individual authors, and critical essays that, because of rubbish. There are several modern Bengali books of which we shall the excellence of their prose, become as much a part of the lite- have to speak in terms of high pyaise, but the number of these is so ratureas any significant novel or poem. Little ofthis has happened. small in comparison with the mass of publications yearly vomiced Writers die, are mourned by other writers, and the matter ends forth by the Bengali press, that they go but a little way towards re- deeming the character of the whole. . . .The case ofcriticism is worse. there. A year goes by, then a decade, and nothing appears to tell We can hardly hope for a healthy and vigorous Bengali literature the reading public why the author deserves to be read and how he in the utter absence of anything like intelligent criticism. ('Bengali fitted into the larger story of a literature to which he spent a Literature') lifetime contributing. Whether it's Srinivas Rayaprol, or Nissim Ezekiel, or A.K. Ramanujan, or Dom Moraes, or Arun Kolatkar, What Bankim said about the state of Bengali literature in 1870 orAgha Shahid Ali, or G.S. Sharat Chandra, or Gopal Honnalgere, could be said about many Indian literatures, particularly the one or Kamala Das, or Dilip Chitre, to mention only the poets, the in English, in 20 1 1. Books continue to daily pour from the press story's been the same. And the dead writer is now rwice dead. Ifwe and some of them are reviewed. The reviews here, unlike reviews can't read or rediscover our contemporaries, what chance of doing elsewhere, seldom connect the title to anything that's been done this for our classics? previously in that genre by others or by the same author. Reading 'Intelligent criticism may be said to be a thing unknown to the them, you'd think that the book had emerged from a litkrary Native Press', bemoaned Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya in 'A nowhere, which it hasn't, though headed for nowhere, 'in the utter Popular Literature for Bengal' (1870): absence of anything like intelligent criticism', it certainly is. The first few weeks in which the reviews appear are, for the book, like There is some inherent defect in the Bengali character which renders the task of distinguishing the beautiful and the true from the gaudy the first few weeks of a newborn's life. This is the period of rampant and the false a task of even greater difficulty than the higher effort infanticide, a time when books are killed not by hostile reviews but of creation. This deficiency in the culture of the cultivated Bengali by meaningless ones. This happens all the time. The review of reacts on the literature. The blundering critic often passes a verdict, an Oriya novel in the literary section of The Hindu of 6 August 4 Partial Recall Introduction 5

2006 began: 'The English translation of this first fruit from the your laziness in writing letters is due to the fact that you try to make late flowering tree of Oriya prose allows a peek into Oriya novel's it too fancy. From now on write with uncomplicated, clear, and plain Darwinian past.'And it continued: 'In an opening that is strikingly words. This will cause less difficulty both for you and your reader. (Translation by Wheeler M. Thackston) unusual for its time, a wealthy young man with raging hormones sees an exquisitely beautiful 16-year-old maiden . . .' My favou- The lesson is hard to escape: great empires-or modest literary rite babu sentence though is not by an English professor from cultures-are not built on a foundation of muddled prose. 'They Bhubaneswar but a Delhi journalist who began his review of all wrote; some wrote well', Gore Vidal says in his essay on 'Robert Naipaul's collection of essays The Writer and His World thus: Graves and the Twelve Caesars'. 'Julius Caesar and Augustus 'The heart of darkness beats on the pacemaker of history' (India were distinguished prosewriters; each preferred plain old-fashioned Today, 16 September 2002). The decline of the English sentence Latin. Augustus particularly disliked what he called the "Asiatic" is no laughing matter, but say that to an Indian and he'll look style, favored by, among others', his rival Marc Antony, whose at you asquint. (Indian art critics are no better than Indian book speeches he found imprecise and "stinking offar-fetched phrases".' reviewers. Meera Devidayal's catalogue of her 2009 painting After the reviews stinking of far-fetched, not to say Asiatic, exhibition in Bombay contains the following gem: 'She [Devi- phrases; after that very Indian tamasha, the book launch, which is dayall has opened up the fractal that is Bombay and immersed part Monsoon Wedding and part Irish wake; after the initial print herself in the lattices of its constituencies.') run of 1100 or 2000 copies is exhausted, the book drops out of The thought never seems to have crossed the minds of these sight. The sad part comes now, for the book, however good it may reviewers that the function of language is to communicate. In his be, stands little chance of being remembered again, whether in 'Letter to Humayun', which appears towards the end of his essay, anthology, or history. It becomes part of the scrub. But do heartbreaking memoir which we know as The Baburnama, the a poll today and ask the Indian reading public whether it is happy first Mughal emperor touches on many things, among them the with the state of affairs and you'll get a high percentage of yeses. importance of clarity in writing: Were there a literary happiness index, Indians would be at the top, the happiest people in the world: instead of the writing, all the As I asked, you have written your letters, but you didn't read them focus seems to be on the advances a few authors get, the Man over, for if you had had a mind to read them, you would have found Bookers they win, the festivals they attend, the number of that you could not. After reading them you certainly would have European languages they get translated into. The reading public changed them. Although your writing can be read with difficulty, it is not complaining. Come to think of it, neither are the jet-lagged is excessively obscure. Who has ever heard of prose being enigmatic? authors, even as they watch their life's work disappear into criti- Your spelling is not bad, although it is not entirely correct either. You wrote iltifat with the wrong t; you wrote qulinj with a y. Your cal oblivion. handwriting can be made out somehow or other, but with all these Through all this, sitting behind editorial desks, goggles pushed obscure words of yours the meaning is not entirely clear. Probably back above hairline, plump women go about their business, 4 Partial Recall Introduction 5

efficiently running their clubby magazines and journals, their heads lost in a great cloud of amnesia. There's always a new book to review or send out for review or an appealingly young Pakistani writer to meet; it's a pleasant enough life. While the women pic- tured above are wholly real, as are the magazines they run, ours still remains a literature in search of one. It's a literature without a serious literary magazine. It has to be said though that even if one existed and the editor (our Barbara Epstein in a Dacca sari) wanted to commission an essay (4000 words), where would she find her Susan Sontag?

Dehra Dun January 20 1 1 Descendants

'He was courteous to a fault and spoke beautiful English', is how someone who was one of his students in the early 1970s described him. s 'What did he teach?' I asked. 'Shakespeare.' 'What was he like as a teacher?' 'I can't say.' 'Why?' 'Because he seldom came to class. Well, he came a few times and then gave us a long list of things to read, Caroline Spurgeon, G. Wilson Knight, M.C. Bradbrook, you know what I mean. The next we heard he had left for Holland, to teach in a school there. He had a droll sense of humour.' Arun Kumar Bhattacharya was a short, compact, neat-looking man. He had a bald head with a fringe of grey hair and a round, pleasant face. Occasionally, I would run into him in the English Department of Allahabad University, where we both taught. He was twenty years older than me, but that was not why we did not have much' to say to each other. There was something prick- ly about him, and I kept my distance. I always noticed, though, that Bhattacharya took great care over his appearance. His cotton shirts, even at the end of a hot day, looked freshly laundered, and his expensive leather sandals, it seemed, were dust-repellent. He 10 Partial Recall Descendants 11

lived in a yellow and white bungalow at the corner of Thornhill In 1858, the year in which the governance of India passed and Albert Road, and drove an Ambassador car, which, more so from the East India Company to the Crown, the capital of the since he was often its only occupant, appeared to be too big for North-Western Provinces shifted from Agra to Allahabad. The him, like an oversized jacket. He was a bachelor. changes to Allahabad which this brought about would have Though Bhattacharya had spent most of his life in Allahabad, seemed dramatic to its inhabitants at the time. A significant rise he was not a native of the city. Unknown even perhaps to himself, in building construction followed an increase in the town's he was part of a long migration that had brought increasing population, particularly around 1870. In the space of little more numbers of Bengalis, mainly, but other communities as well- than a decade, centuries of isolation gave way to cosmopolitanism; Kashmiri Pandits, Gujarati Nagars, a few entrepreneurial Parsis- village settlements to city roads and parks, tower clocks and spires, to Gangetic upcountry towns in the second half of the nineteenth bandstands and covered markets, gymkhana clubs and news- century. What drew these people to places like Patna, Allahabad, paper offices, law courts and colleges, hospitals and libraries. To and Cawnpore were the new opportunities in education and medi- the rural sounds of belled cattle returning home was added the cine, business and trade, the administration and the judiciary, rattle ofthe latest printing machines of the Pioneer Press and the opened up, ironically, by colonialism. The 'British Empire was ping of the shuttlecock from a game of badminton in progress in the empire of Steam', Jan Morris has remarked, but though built the gardens of Belvedere House, described by a late-nineteenth- as part of the infrastructure of colonialism and staffed chiefly by century resident as 'a famous old bungalow which [had] been Anglo-Indians, the railways were crucial to this Indian migration. standing since the Mutiny days of 1857.' Belvedere House is where, in 1888, Rudyard Kipling wrote his short story 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep' and which, later, he recalled in 'Kkki-Tikki-Tavi'. New service quarters (mohullas)-Allengunj near the university, The colonial city of Allahabad, the area today known as Civil Lukergunj near the railway station-came up to accommodate Lines, stands on the site of eight villages, which the British, to the growing population, and even today if one goes there one teach the natives a lesson, razed to the ground after the Mutiny gets the feeling that one has come to a different part of the country. of 1857. 'Helpless women, with suckling ififants at their breasts, The shop signs are in Bengali and banner ads for Ranga-Java felt the weight of our vengeance no less than the vilest malefactors', Deluxe Sindur hang outside. wrote a historian of the Mutiny of events in the city. And one The Kashmiri Pandits had no mohulla of their own, but that is British officer spoke of his day's work thus: because many of them were vakils, lawyers who had made enough

One trip I enjoyed amazingly; we got on board a steamer with a gun, money on the High Court Bar to live more grandly. In the 1880s while the Sikhs and the fusiliers marched up to the city. We steamed one of them, Ajudhia Nath Kunzru, was earning something like up throwing shots right and left till we got up to the bad places. Rs 80,000 a year from his practice alone. Sir Tej Bahadur Saprui when we went on the shore and peppered away with our guns, my palatial house on Albert Road has been torn down, and so has own old double-barrel bringing down several niggers. Kailash Nath Katju's on Edmonstone Road, but Motilal Nehrui Partial Recall Descendants Anand Bhavan still stands, a two-storey white building with a Rustam said, 'If you want to know about Allahabad Parsis, colonnaded verandah running round it. Judging the standards by you should go and see Meher Dhondy. She knows much more of the time, it is not very large, nor is it ostentatious in the same than I do. Moreover, she has many interesting things in her house. way that contemporary Bania- or Punjabi-Gothic is. Motilal ap- Her father was the photographer J.M. Patell, and she may even pears to have been a man of taste. have some old photographs. We don't have anything like that in In Civil Lines, where initially only the British could occupv the Finaro, not even old hotel guest registers.' the bungalows, some of the best business establishments were I asked him ifhe remembered any of the guests who had stayed Parsi-owned. Guzders was a bar and restaurant, T. Shaporjee & in the Finaro. Sons was a general merchant's, C.D. Motishaw and Co. a car and 'I got to know Professor J.B. Harrison from the School of motorcycle showroom, and J.M. Patell described itself as 'Photo- Oriental and African Studies in London quite well. He would be graphers and Artists'. Opposite the High Court was Hotel Finaro. 8 here for months at a time, working away in the municipality on Owned by Rhoda Gandhi, it has been home to many generations the history of Allahabad's sanitation system. We have been in of British and American researchers who have come to Allahabad touch off and on. I also remember Gillian Buckee, who was to consult the Regional Archives after Independence or work in working on the High Court. But I've no idea where she is now.' the Record Rooms ofthe High Court, the Commissioner's Office, or the Municipal Board.

I had heard of Meher Dhondy. She used to teach in the Girls' High School and now gives English lessons at home. Her classes are much in demand. She was probably in her seventies but From the road, which was once Hastings Road and is now Nyaya sounded youthful on the phone when I called her. Marg, the small six-room Hotel Finaro looks like someone's house. 'Come at twelve-thirty', she said, 'I should be through with One of Allahabad's few remaining colonial bungalows, one part my teaching by then. I have another batch of students coming of it is still a private residence. Rhoda Gandhi's son Rustam now later, so don't stay too long. I have sprained my right hand and lives there. He runs the hotel, in addition to managing his manu- feel a bit under the weather.' facturing business. I asked her how to get to her house. A heavily built man in his mid sixties with a broad forehead 'You know Rustam's workshop? We're right behind it, in the and a lumbering walk, Rustam was wearing a bright chequered same compound. But don't take the first gate, which leads to shirt and navy-blue trousers when I met him. We sat in the veran- Lokbharati Press. Take the second one, beside Gaytime. There's a dah, where the only furniture was some straight-backed chairs, PC0 there and a bicycle repair shop. You'll see two neem trees two of which we occupied. The ambience could not have been when you reach the end of the compound. Our house is behind more unhotel-like. the big bungalow, opposite the trees. You can't miss it.' Partial Recall Descendants Anand Bhavan still stands, a two-storey white building with a Rustam said, 'If you want to know about Allahabad Parsis, colonnaded verandah running round it. Judging the standards by you should go and see Meher Dhondy. She knows much more of the time, it is not very large, nor is it ostentatious in the same than I do. Moreover, she has many interesting things in her house. way that contemporary Bania- or Punjabi-Gothic is. Motilal ap- Her father was the photographer J.M. Patell, and she may even pears to have been a man of taste. have some old photographs. We don't have anything like that in In Civil Lines, where initially only the British could occupv the Finaro, not even old hotel guest registers.' the bungalows, some of the best business establishments were I asked him ifhe remembered any of the guests who had stayed Parsi-owned. Guzders was a bar and restaurant, T. Shaporjee & in the Finaro. Sons was a general merchant's, C.D. Motishaw and Co. a car and 'I got to know Professor J.B. Harrison from the School of motorcycle showroom, and J.M. Patell described itself as 'Photo- Oriental and African Studies in London quite well. He would be graphers and Artists'. Opposite the High Court was Hotel Finaro. 8 here for months at a time, working away in the municipality on Owned by Rhoda Gandhi, it has been home to many generations the history of Allahabad's sanitation system. We have been in of British and American researchers who have come to Allahabad touch off and on. I also remember Gillian Buckee, who was to consult the Regional Archives after Independence or work in working on the High Court. But I've no idea where she is now.' the Record Rooms ofthe High Court, the Commissioner's Office, or the Municipal Board.

The directions she gave took me by surprise. Not only did I 'He was J.M. Patell. He spelt Patell with rwo l's, Pat-ell. Actually, know the place, I had been going past it all my life. It had always it's the same as Patel, but he thought Pate1 was too common- looked to be uninhabited. The gates had disappeared long ago sounding. He was a daylight photographer, one of the last of the and only the gateposts remained, their plaster gone, revealing the breed. Unlike other photographers, my father did not use any bricks. The compound, though little more than a dusty field, was form of artificial lighting in his studio. The glass panes in the big enough to hold a football match in. The bungalow stood at roof let in natural light and he took his pictures in it. This limited one end. It was a low, white building in surprisingly good repair, the hours he could work. It was rwo hours in the morning and with a long verandah in front and castellation along the top. There just one in the afternoon. If the results did not satisfy him, he was a cross on top of the portico, like a finial. Below the cross it asked the sitter to come back. In the end, the advances in tech- said Pentecostal Church. nology drove him out of business. Photography had become The beginnings of a footpath with wild shrubs on one side, cheaper, though the prints were hot of the same quality as before. where once there would have been a gravel drive lined with flower- He closed down the business in the mid 1950s, preferring to do beds, appeared a little beyond the gatepost. I bicycled down the that than to change his way of working' path, went past the bungalow, and immediately came to the neem 'What happened to his cameras and other equipment?' trees. Opposite them, and hidden from the road, was a cottage 'You know how it is. People would come and say, "Mr Patell, with a tiled roof. The terracotta tiles looked freshly painted and we are setting up a studio. Your equipment is of no use to you gave the place a cheerful appearance. I arrived just when a class now, why don't you give it to us." And he would hand it over had ended and saw the students coming out, the boys wearing to them.' blue blazers and grey trousers and the girls in green cardigans 'Do you have any of his photographs?' and grey skirts. 'Not really. But I'll look. Right now, I don't have the time. You Mrs Dhondy, a short, slender woman with the faintest of grey see, my father was quite famous in Allahabad. He was more than strands in her hair, greeted me in the verandah and took me inside. a photographer; he was a photographer-artist. People would bring Her sitting-room had a bare floor and though the furniture in it him the picture of someone recently deceased, taken just before belonged to an earlier period, the photographs on the walls were the cremation or burial, or sometimes in the morgue, and ask contemporary. They showed smiling West Indian cricketers posing him to show the person as he or she looked when still alive. My with a young man who too was smiling and looked like a busi- father would take a photograph of the picture and then set about ness executive. transforming it, painting the eyes in, adding a bit of black to the Mrs Dhondy saw me looking at the photographs and said, hair, some pink to the lips. The customers yould be delighted.' 'That's my son. He's passionate about cricket. Those pictures were I asked Mrs Dhondy how long her family had been settled in taken in Sharjah.' Allahabad. I began by asking her about her father. 'We've been here since the early 1900s. In the old days everyone 16 Partial Recall Descendants 17 knew the bungalow, 18 Canning Road, as Moti Sahib's hatta. I asked again about the Patell photographs and she said that Moti Sahib was C.D. Motishaw, my mother's father. In one part she was not certain where they were, or even if she had any. She of the bungalow he had a motor showroom, the biggest motor then changed the subject. showroom in the United Provinces. As a child, I remember sneak- She said, 'I do a bit of writing myself. I write poems mostly ing into it to look at the gleaming new cars and motorcycles kept but also a little prose. I've written something on the Parsis that there. I do not recall any of the makes except one, a Packard. It I'd like you to see. Like everything else, it is somewhere in this was a big car, more like a picnic bus. house, if I can only find it. 'My grandfather died in 1937 and 18 Canning Road was passed 'Did you know, there's a lamppost outside All Saints Cathedral on to my grandmother, from whom I inherited it. Even in her which says it was donated by C.D. Motishaw? It was one of four time, we had a big rose garden. It was roses roses roses all the way special lampposts erected as part of the beautification of Civil to the front gate. In the middle of the garden was a circular plat- Lines. Were the English ever to 'come back and see what we've form, about twelve inches in height, where Mrs Benson's Anglo- done to this place, they'll look for the nearest well to jump into. Indian band played during my wedding reception. The band was 'The other day, there was a Toyota parked on the road, blocking nothing like the bands you see nowadays. It always included the entrance. I was in a rickshaw and kept sitting in it, glaring a pianist.' at the man whose car it was. He looked the neta type. But do Mrs Dhondy briefly interrupted her train of thought to ask if you think he got the message? "My rickshaw does not have wings", I'd like some coffee. I said to him, "so unless you move your car I cannot get out 'Allahabad's Parsi community', she resumed, 'which is now of the compound." To my rickshaw-walla I whispered, "Their down to twenty members, was never very large. In my grand- ill-gotten money can buy these people cars, but no amount of father's time, it numbered around one hundred and fifty. It was a money will buy them good breeding. Their fathers did not pos- matter of great pride with us that despite our small number the sess even a bicycle."' top man in every field, not just business, was often a Parsi. Your Mrs Dhondy had switched to the local dialect, Eastern Avadhi, English Department in the university had Dr P.E. Dustoor, the which she spoke fluently when she told me what she had said to Economics Department had Dr J.K. Mehta, and among medical the car owner and the rickshaw-walla. doctors there was Dr Hirji, the dentist. Rhoda Gandhi was his She said, 'My husband keeps warning me that I'll get into daughter. For many years after they left Allahabad, I kept up a trouble for the kinds of things I say. With Independence, we got correspondence with Dr and Mrs Dustoor. They would write to freedom, but I don't think we got justice.' me from Kodaikanal and afterwards from Poona. I had preserved The second 'we' referred to the Parsis. Mrs Dhondy said it their letters, but at some point they got misplaced. I always say, with a note of bitterness, but it was so fleeting that I almost did if, God forbid, a thief were to break into our house, all he is not notice it. Outside, through the parted curtains, I saw students going to find are photographs and papers, and more papers and in the verandah, arriving for the next class. As I got up to leave, I more photographs.' asked her about the Pentecostal Church. 16 Partial Recall Descendants 17 knew the bungalow, 18 Canning Road, as Moti Sahib's hatta. I asked again about the Patell photographs and she said that Moti Sahib was C.D. Motishaw, my mother's father. In one part she was not certain where they were, or even if she had any. She of the bungalow he had a motor showroom, the biggest motor then changed the subject. showroom in the United Provinces. As a child, I remember sneak- She said, 'I do a bit of writing myself. I write poems mostly ing into it to look at the gleaming new cars and motorcycles kept but also a little prose. I've written something on the Parsis that there. I do not recall any of the makes except one, a Packard. It I'd like you to see. Like everything else, it is somewhere in this was a big car, more like a picnic bus. house, if I can only find it. 'My grandfather died in 1937 and 18 Canning Road was passed 'Did you know, there's a lamppost outside All Saints Cathedral on to my grandmother, from whom I inherited it. Even in her which says it was donated by C.D. Motishaw? It was one of four time, we had a big rose garden. It was roses roses roses all the way special lampposts erected as part of the beautification of Civil to the front gate. In the middle of the garden was a circular plat- Lines. Were the English ever to 'come back and see what we've form, about twelve inches in height, where Mrs Benson's Anglo- done to this place, they'll look for the nearest well to jump into. Indian band played during my wedding reception. The band was 'The other day, there was a Toyota parked on the road, blocking nothing like the bands you see nowadays. It always included the entrance. I was in a rickshaw and kept sitting in it, glaring a pianist.' at the man whose car it was. He looked the neta type. But do Mrs Dhondy briefly interrupted her train of thought to ask if you think he got the message? "My rickshaw does not have wings", I'd like some coffee. I said to him, "so unless you move your car I cannot get out 'Allahabad's Parsi community', she resumed, 'which is now of the compound." To my rickshaw-walla I whispered, "Their down to twenty members, was never very large. In my grand- ill-gotten money can buy these people cars, but no amount of father's time, it numbered around one hundred and fifty. It was a money will buy them good breeding. Their fathers did not pos- matter of great pride with us that despite our small number the sess even a bicycle."' top man in every field, not just business, was often a Parsi. Your Mrs Dhondy had switched to the local dialect, Eastern Avadhi, English Department in the university had Dr P.E. Dustoor, the which she spoke fluently when she told me what she had said to Economics Department had Dr J.K. Mehta, and among medical the car owner and the rickshaw-walla. doctors there was Dr Hirji, the dentist. Rhoda Gandhi was his She said, 'My husband keeps warning me that I'll get into daughter. For many years after they left Allahabad, I kept up a trouble for the kinds of things I say. With Independence, we got correspondence with Dr and Mrs Dustoor. They would write to freedom, but I don't think we got justice.' me from Kodaikanal and afterwards from Poona. I had preserved The second 'we' referred to the Parsis. Mrs Dhondy said it their letters, but at some point they got misplaced. I always say, with a note of bitterness, but it was so fleeting that I almost did if, God forbid, a thief were to break into our house, all he is not notice it. Outside, through the parted curtains, I saw students going to find are photographs and papers, and more papers and in the verandah, arriving for the next class. As I got up to leave, I more photographs.' asked her about the Pentecostal Church. 18 Partial Recall Descendants 19

She said, 'They're our tenants. They're very quiet and are no were sufficiently large in number, and, perhaps more importantly, trouble at all. They've been here a long time.' the print technology and rail and postal infrastructure were available, for someone to come up with the idea of launching a Bengali magazine from the city. This was Ramananda Chatterjee. Ramananda, who belonged to a poor Brahmin family from One of the earliest accounts to mention the Bengali presence in Bankura in Bengal, was educated at Calcutta University. At a Allahabad was Bishop Heber's Narrative ofajourney Through the comparatively young age he was appointed Principal of Kayastha Upper Provinces oflndia (1828). In it, Heber remarked that the Pathshala in Allahabad, where he lived from 1895 to 1908. Per- 'Bengalees' who had come and settled in 'these provinces' when haps the greatest magazine editor India has known, he started they were placed under British governors, were 'regarded by the Prabasi [Expatriate] in 1901, and a second magazine, The Modern Hindoostanees as no less foreigners than the English, and even Review, in 1907. The contributors to the inaugural issue of The more odious than Franks, from ancient prejudice, and from their Modern Review included Sister Nivedita ('The Function ofArt in national reputation of craft, covetousness, and cowardice.' Shaping Nationality'), E.B. Have11 ('The Indian Handloom A later visitor, who travelled through some of the same places Industry'), and Jadunath Sarkar ('Shivaji Letters'). It also carried as Heber, was Bholanuath Chunder. He came to Allahabad in reproductions of three Ravi Varma paintings, along with an 1860, when the Mutiny was still fresh in everyone's minds. The editorial note on the artist, who had recently died. Ramananda size of the Bengali community had grown in the intervening said in the note, 'A foreign literature and foreign tongue, as Eng- decades, and it was this rather than the foreignness that caught lish is, cannot serve as the medium through which we may know Chunder's attention. 'Great numbers of Bengalees abound in one another and interchange our deepest thoughts and feelings. Allahabad, some six thousand. Their errands are various-health, The books, periodicals and newspapers which we write in English wealth, and pilgrimage', he wrote in Travels ofa Hindoo (1869), a have their uses, but they do not either reveal or reach the heart book which many at the time thought was written not by an of the nation.' The romantic idea that the heart of a nation can Indian but by a European under a pseudonym. Moreover, what find expression only in the vernacular is still with us. Though to the 'Hindoostanees', in Heber's account, indicated the Bengali's today the idea seems a little out of date, a hundred years ago 'covetousness', was to Chunder a sign of prosperity and generosity, it would have sounded different: ardently nationalist, forward- some of which he partook of. He described his local host in the looking, modern. following terms, 'In the true spirit of a fast money-making and Differences with the college management over educational money-expending Kayust, Baboo N-is accustomed to keep an reforms made Ramananda resign from his Kayastha Pathshala open house and table for all his friends passing on, and from, a job, and the following year, in 1908, he ran into trouble with the tour of the Upper Provinces.' British over some of the views expressed in The Modern Review. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Allahabad Bengalis For instance, to the stated British opinion that Indian nationalism Descendants 21 20 Partial Recall go back to Allahabad. It is difficult to imagine a boy his age taking was losing momentum, Ramananda wrote: 'Never in the history this decision on his own, but Chintamoni's life, at least in the of the world has there been committed any aggression that did telling, with only family sources to go by, is like a fable. not end in raising up a greater force of resistance to overwhelm In the beginning, things weren't easy for him. His mother and it.' Served with an order to close down the Review or leave Allaha- gandmother had between them a few gold ornaments, most of bad, he chose the latter option and returned to Calcutta, moving which they sold off to settle the debts accumulated during Madhav the editorial offices of the two magazines with him. By then he Chandra's illness and to make the journey to Bally. The rest they was also heavily in debt. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who joined the sold on their return to Allahabad, to meet the expenses in their editorial staff in 1928, wrote about the magazines in his autobio- first months in the city. Chintamoni had attended school in Bena- graphy Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1 987): 'The Prabasi stood for res, where his teachers had found him to be a quick learner with both nationalism and liberalism, and it was the magazine to which an aptitude for maths. He now wanted to resume his educa- Tagore gave most of his new work. It also had the pick of the best tion, but being the only male in the family was forced to look for work in fiction and poetry in the Bengali language. It was a great work instead. honour for any new writer to appear in it. . . . The Modern Review His first job was with the Pioneer newspaper, where, at a salary in English had an all-India circulation and was more weighty of Rs 10 per month, he became a dispatch clerk. The large leather- politically. It was read with interest and respect even by the British bound registers in which he was supposed to make entries were, Governors.' for a young boy, difficult to reach, and Chintamoni had them In Allahabad, both Prabasi and The Modem Review were print- brought down and did the posting sitting on the floor. When ed at The Indian Press, founded by Chintamoni Ghosh. The his immediate Indian bosses saw that the lad was hard-working, Ghoshs came from Bally in Howrah District in Bengal. Chinta- they piled more work on him. But whenever he got the chance moni's father, Madhav Chandra, held an administrative job under he spent time in the printing room. There he picked up the rudi- the British, and in 1864 was posted to Benares. After two years ments of the trade-typesetting, make-up, and imposition, all in Benares, Madhav Chandra came to Allahabad on official work, the while dreaming, as his biographer N.G. Bagchi writes, 'the but he was suddenly taken ill on the trip and died shortly after- far-fetched dream of owning a press someday!' wards. His mother, wife, and two children, Chintamoni, aged His father's death had interrupted his formal education, and 12, and an older daughter, all of whom had rushed from Benares he now did everything he could to make up for its lack. Luckily, when they heard of the illness, were with him when he died. his job at the Pioneer entitled him to a free copy of the paper. He According to family legend, Chintamoni returned to Bally, then read it every day, line by line, as though it were a textbook, and in a week's journey from Allahabad, but did not stay there for long. this manner improved his English. He was with the newspaper His uncles, he discovered, were eyeing his share of the ancestral for about seven years, and, when he left, it had to hire five men to property and had hatched a plot to murder him. With few options do the work he had performed single-handed. open, Chintamoni decided that he must leave Bally at once and Descendants 21 20 Partial Recall go back to Allahabad. It is difficult to imagine a boy his age taking was losing momentum, Ramananda wrote: 'Never in the history this decision on his own, but Chintamoni's life, at least in the of the world has there been committed any aggression that did telling, with only family sources to go by, is like a fable. not end in raising up a greater force of resistance to overwhelm In the beginning, things weren't easy for him. His mother and it.' Served with an order to close down the Review or leave Allaha- gandmother had between them a few gold ornaments, most of bad, he chose the latter option and returned to Calcutta, moving which they sold off to settle the debts accumulated during Madhav the editorial offices of the two magazines with him. By then he Chandra's illness and to make the journey to Bally. The rest they was also heavily in debt. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who joined the sold on their return to Allahabad, to meet the expenses in their editorial staff in 1928, wrote about the magazines in his autobio- first months in the city. Chintamoni had attended school in Bena- graphy Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1 987): 'The Prabasi stood for res, where his teachers had found him to be a quick learner with both nationalism and liberalism, and it was the magazine to which an aptitude for maths. He now wanted to resume his educa- Tagore gave most of his new work. It also had the pick of the best tion, but being the only male in the family was forced to look for work in fiction and poetry in the Bengali language. It was a great work instead. honour for any new writer to appear in it. . . . The Modern Review His first job was with the Pioneer newspaper, where, at a salary in English had an all-India circulation and was more weighty of Rs 10 per month, he became a dispatch clerk. The large leather- politically. It was read with interest and respect even by the British bound registers in which he was supposed to make entries were, Governors.' for a young boy, difficult to reach, and Chintamoni had them In Allahabad, both Prabasi and The Modem Review were print- brought down and did the posting sitting on the floor. When ed at The Indian Press, founded by Chintamoni Ghosh. The his immediate Indian bosses saw that the lad was hard-working, Ghoshs came from Bally in Howrah District in Bengal. Chinta- they piled more work on him. But whenever he got the chance moni's father, Madhav Chandra, held an administrative job under he spent time in the printing room. There he picked up the rudi- the British, and in 1864 was posted to Benares. After two years ments of the trade-typesetting, make-up, and imposition, all in Benares, Madhav Chandra came to Allahabad on official work, the while dreaming, as his biographer N.G. Bagchi writes, 'the but he was suddenly taken ill on the trip and died shortly after- far-fetched dream of owning a press someday!' wards. His mother, wife, and two children, Chintamoni, aged His father's death had interrupted his formal education, and 12, and an older daughter, all of whom had rushed from Benares he now did everything he could to make up for its lack. Luckily, when they heard of the illness, were with him when he died. his job at the Pioneer entitled him to a free copy of the paper. He According to family legend, Chintamoni returned to Bally, then read it every day, line by line, as though it were a textbook, and in a week's journey from Allahabad, but did not stay there for long. this manner improved his English. He was with the newspaper His uncles, he discovered, were eyeing his share of the ancestral for about seven years, and, when he left, it had to hire five men to property and had hatched a plot to murder him. With few options do the work he had performed single-handed. open, Chintamoni decided that he must leave Bally at once and 22 Partial Recall Descendants 23

Chintamoni's next job was with the Railway Mail Service, but Press was a series of physical geography readers in 1887. The he was there for a few days only. When a vacancy of Head Clerk author was E.G. Hill, who later became professor of chemistry at arose at the Meteorological Department, he applied, and so im- the Muir Central College of Allahabad University. Hill had sold pressed the English superintendent that though there were many the copyright to Chintamoni against a one-time fee, so when the applicants with better qualifications he was selected above them. Department of Public Instruction approved them for school It was during his years in the Meteorological Department that he adoption it was the publisher and not Hill who reaped the benefits. got married and also discovered that he had an eye for business. The story goes that Hill once remarked upon how successful He bought railway sleepers cheaply at an auction and after getting his books had been and Chintamoni, though not contractually the wood chopped into small pieces sold it as fuel at a modest bound to do so, immediately offered to share part of the profits profit. One day he hit on the idea of converting some of the with him; an offer that Hill, in keeping with such stories, graci- wood into cheap furniture and hired a carpenter to execute the ously refused. v plan. The profit from this new venture was considerable, and he Two years later, in 1889, Chintamoni brought out a series of was soon looking for a partner to expand the business. graded readers for Hindi, Shikshavali, that turned out to be even The dream of being a printer, though, had not left him, and more successful. Compared with the books then available, which when a Crown hand press with accessories, belonging to a regi- were printed in the Government Press on indifferent paper and mental unit, came up for sale, he saw his chance. Along with a had been prepared thirty years earlier, these readers broke new friend who put up half the money, he bought the machine and ground in terms of language and content as well as layout and had it installed in a room in his house. He could not afford to typography. For generations of Indian children they were their hire an assistant and did everything himself, including the printing, first experience of Hindi in the classroom, just as, later, the Radiant after coming back from his office in the Meteorological Depart- Readers were their first taste of English. Soon after Shikshavali ment. There was, in an expanding city, no shortage of work and was published Chintamoni decided to resign his job in the the press did extremely well, but before a year had passed his Meteorological Department and devote all his time to running friend heard the call of God and, losing all interest in the business, The Indian Press. decided to quit. Nevertheless, he was a decent sort and did not Chintamoni died in August 1928. The following month, the ask for anything more than what he had initially put in. Chinta- influential Hindi monthly Saraswati, which he had started in moni, who knew a good deal when he saw one, immediately raised 1900, brought out a commemorative issue on him. It consisted the funds to pay off his friend and on 4 June 1884 had the press of reminiscences and eulogies, some of the latter, by Maithili registered as The Indian Press. He was 30 years old at the time. Sharan Gupta and Mahabir Prasad Dwivedi, in poetic form. During the early years of printing in India, as in Europe also, Dwivedi had been the editor of Saraswati from 1903 to 1920. the roles of printer and publisher were combined in the same During this period he held perhaps the most important job in person. The first title published by Chintamoni fromThe Indian the Hindi literary world. For a writer to be published in Saraswati 24 Partial Recall Descendants 2 5 was a sign of national recognition. Dwivedi first came to Chinta- other a sign saying 'Post Office'. The hundreds of book parcels rnoni's notice when he saw a scathing review by him of a Hindi that were dispatched every day from the Press, many by VPP primer published by The Indian Press. The review so impressed to individual customers in remote villages, had led the postal Chintamoni that instead of being offended he offered Dwivedi department to set up a post office on the premises itself. In these the editorship of his magazine. The reminiscences in the com- parcels, in addition to school textbooks, went copies of Saraswati; memorative issue were by Shyamsundar Das, who was the first a Nawab Rai novel; the first illustrated title in Hindi for young editor ofSaraswati, Ganganatha Jha, and C.Y. Chintamani, among adults; Mahabir Prasad Dwivedi's translations of Bhartrihari, several others. On the last page were messages from abroad, in- Kalidasa, Jayadeva, Jagannath, and Herbert Spencer; Shyamsundar cluding one from 2 1 Holland Street, Kensington, London, by Das's annotated edition of Ramcaritmanas; the Valmiki Rama- E.G. Hill's widow. yana; scholarly editions ofvidyapati's poems and Tulsidas's Knaya The commemorative issue also carried a number of half-tone Patrika; the first anthology of poems in Khari Boli; Edwin photographs. They showed Chintamoni's mother, his wife, and Greaves's Hindi grammar; Hindi translations of Fa Hsien, Hiuen him with his gandchildren; others showed the Ghosh residences Tsiang, Alberuni, Shakespeare, Romesh Chunder Dutt, and Sharat in Benares, Puri, and Allahabad. These were imposing buildings, Chandra; an early Hindi novel written specifically for women; colonial piles on a grand scale, but by themselves, without any and, in 1926, Sumitranandan Pant's Pallav, a collection of poems sign of human activity in the foreground, the houses looked aban- which is generally said to contain his finest work. doned. The majority of the photographs, however, were about Just as the Chosh family bought houses in other cities, The The Indian Press. These were pictures of typecasting machines Indian Press also expanded outside Allahabad. One of the photo- and litho presses, cameras and photo-etching equipment, Linotype graphs was of the company's Calcutta branch, its thirty-odd composing machines and offset printing machines. One picture, employees standing in a semicircle in front of it; another showed titled 'English Composing Room', showed rows of young men, the Indian Publishing House building. Set up in 1908, the Indian their heads bent, seated behind wooden cases; others showed the Publishing House was a subsidiary ofThe Indian Press and had stitching and binding rooms, the men in them working sitting its offices at 22 Cornwallis Street, Calcutta. It published books in on the floor. The pictures encapsulated the history of printing in Bangla and had brought out a history of the Bengali language, a the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. life ofVidyasagar, and a two-volume Bangla dictionary. Rabindra- Perhaps the picture that best gives an idea of the scale ofThe nath Tagore was one of their authors. Indian Press is of a bald man with a white handlebar moustache, Tagore had first heard of Chintamoni Ghosh and The Indian wearing a dhoti and coat, and sitting behind an office table that Press through Prabasi, to which he was a regular contributor. It is placed in a doorway, blocking it. There are, on the table, was unusual in the first decade of the last century for high-quality some papers, a metal office tray, rubber scamps, and an inkpad. A printing in Bangla to be done outside Calcutta, and Tagore had 'No Admission' sign is nailed on one of the door panels, on the been struck by what a printer in Allahabad had achieved. 24 Partial Recall Descendants 2 5 was a sign of national recognition. Dwivedi first came to Chinta- other a sign saying 'Post Office'. The hundreds of book parcels rnoni's notice when he saw a scathing review by him of a Hindi that were dispatched every day from the Press, many by VPP primer published by The Indian Press. The review so impressed to individual customers in remote villages, had led the postal Chintamoni that instead of being offended he offered Dwivedi department to set up a post office on the premises itself. In these the editorship of his magazine. The reminiscences in the com- parcels, in addition to school textbooks, went copies of Saraswati; memorative issue were by Shyamsundar Das, who was the first a Nawab Rai novel; the first illustrated title in Hindi for young editor ofSaraswati, Ganganatha Jha, and C.Y. Chintamani, among adults; Mahabir Prasad Dwivedi's translations of Bhartrihari, several others. On the last page were messages from abroad, in- Kalidasa, Jayadeva, Jagannath, and Herbert Spencer; Shyamsundar cluding one from 2 1 Holland Street, Kensington, London, by Das's annotated edition of Ramcaritmanas; the Valmiki Rama- E.G. Hill's widow. yana; scholarly editions ofvidyapati's poems and Tulsidas's Knaya The commemorative issue also carried a number of half-tone Patrika; the first anthology of poems in Khari Boli; Edwin photographs. They showed Chintamoni's mother, his wife, and Greaves's Hindi grammar; Hindi translations of Fa Hsien, Hiuen him with his gandchildren; others showed the Ghosh residences Tsiang, Alberuni, Shakespeare, Romesh Chunder Dutt, and Sharat in Benares, Puri, and Allahabad. These were imposing buildings, Chandra; an early Hindi novel written specifically for women; colonial piles on a grand scale, but by themselves, without any and, in 1926, Sumitranandan Pant's Pallav, a collection of poems sign of human activity in the foreground, the houses looked aban- which is generally said to contain his finest work. doned. The majority of the photographs, however, were about Just as the Chosh family bought houses in other cities, The The Indian Press. These were pictures of typecasting machines Indian Press also expanded outside Allahabad. One of the photo- and litho presses, cameras and photo-etching equipment, Linotype graphs was of the company's Calcutta branch, its thirty-odd composing machines and offset printing machines. One picture, employees standing in a semicircle in front of it; another showed titled 'English Composing Room', showed rows of young men, the Indian Publishing House building. Set up in 1908, the Indian their heads bent, seated behind wooden cases; others showed the Publishing House was a subsidiary ofThe Indian Press and had stitching and binding rooms, the men in them working sitting its offices at 22 Cornwallis Street, Calcutta. It published books in on the floor. The pictures encapsulated the history of printing in Bangla and had brought out a history of the Bengali language, a the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. life ofVidyasagar, and a two-volume Bangla dictionary. Rabindra- Perhaps the picture that best gives an idea of the scale ofThe nath Tagore was one of their authors. Indian Press is of a bald man with a white handlebar moustache, Tagore had first heard of Chintamoni Ghosh and The Indian wearing a dhoti and coat, and sitting behind an office table that Press through Prabasi, to which he was a regular contributor. It is placed in a doorway, blocking it. There are, on the table, was unusual in the first decade of the last century for high-quality some papers, a metal office tray, rubber scamps, and an inkpad. A printing in Bangla to be done outside Calcutta, and Tagore had 'No Admission' sign is nailed on one of the door panels, on the been struck by what a printer in Allahabad had achieved. 26 Partial Recall Descendants 27

His own association withThe Indian Press came about through garland, whose withered flowers were still a bright orange, gave the efforts of Charuchandra Bandhopadhya~,a Bengali writer to the statue a touch of colour. On one side of it, along a wall, who worked for Prabasi and had earlier worked for the Tagore were stacked reams of printing paper in white plastic wrapping. family magazine Bharati, and of Nepal Chandra Roy, who was On the other was a row of wooden almirahs with glass fronts, the the retired headmaster of the Anglo-Bengali School in Allahabad. glass mostly missing or broken. The almirahs were padlocked According to the Deed of Agreement registered in 1906 between and crammed with books, their titles illegible. On the wall was Chintamoni and Tagore, The Indian Press became Tagore's main an oil portrait of a slender-looking elderly man in mortarboard publishers. Apart from bringing out individual titles-Gitanjali and gown. He was Shyamsundar Das. (1910), Gitali (1914), Balaka (19 16)-they also published his I walked along the almirahs and came to a break in the row. collected poems in a ten-volume uniform edition, Kavya Grantha Since there was no one around whom I could ask for directions, (1915-16). I took a chance and turned inte it, as into a doorway. I found Tagore's association with the Press ended in 1922 when he set myself in the midst of more almirahs, but arranged to form an up his university, Viswabharati. He had donated the money from office cabin. There was no electricity because of a power-cut and his Nobel Prize and all his earnings from royalties to it, but the it was dark inside the cabin, but once my eyes had adjusted to the institution needed more funds. He wrote to Chintamoni, asking darkness I could make out an office table and someone sitting him if he would surrender his rights to the Tagore titles so that behind it. This was Supratik Ghosh, Chintamoni's great-grandson. Viswabharati could publish them and the profits accrue to the Supratik was in his mid forties but his square glasses, sweptback university. Chintamoni agreed, and though the loss of a bestselling thinning hair, and slightly sagging jaw made him look older. He author affected his balance-sheet he did not take a rupee in com- seemed naturally reticent as well as suspicious of people he pensation. To his son Hari Keshab-to whom he would leave had not met before. To get him to talk about himself to a complete the responsibility of running The Indian Press after his death- stranger was, initially, not easy. he reportedly said, 'I have not merely given back the rights. I Supratik said, 'After finishing school, I thought I would do have made a permanent contribution to the nation.' mechanical engineering like my father, who had studied at Jadavpur. I spent a whole year cramming for the entrance exam, but could not make the grade. In the end I joined the university. I did a BSc and then took a master's degree in economics. After A glass-encased life-size statue of Chintamoni Ghosh, his dates that, for many years, I worked for my father's company, Precision engraved on the pedestal, stands in the front hall, near the entrance Tools. Essentially, we did work for two industrial units based in of The Indian Press. His right hand grips a walking stick; his left Naini, Hindustan Cables and Triveni Engineering. But in the fist is clenched, to suggest determination, He has a full beard. 1990s they were beset with labour problems and eventually closed When I visited The Indian Press for the first time, a marigold down. We found it difficult to survive without them, and though 2 8 Partial Recall Descendants 29 we continued for a couple of more years we had to close down Our next meeting was again during a power-cut, so I was sur- too. I have been with The Indian Press since. You could say I am prised to find there was light in the cabin. It came from a solitary a late entrant. 'I tried my hand at publishing at first and brought out a set of striplight suspended from the ceiling. In the background, I could six study guides, one on general knowledge, one on Indian history, hear the muffled sound of a genset. The ceiling, I noticed, was one on political science, and so on, aimed at candidates taking black with cobwebs and had wires stretched across it. Some of the Provincial Civil Service exam. The pides sold well, especially the wires led to a fan or to a light fixture, but often these were in the shops on University Road. The snag came when I went to missing, leaving the wires hanging. the booksellers to collect the money they owed me. They would Separating Supratik's cabin from the one adjoining it was a never say that they wouldn't pay, but all the same would fob me wooden partition with a door in the middle and glass panels on the sides. This time the door was open. I could see, in the other off with some excuse or other. Every few days I would make the # rounds on my scooter and come away empty-handed. In the end, cabin, a refrigerator that seemed to have been designed when Art unable to recover a single paisa, I lost interest in the project. It's a Deco was all the rage; an office table heaped with papers that had dirty market.' turned yellow; a revolving office chair with torn upholstery; two I asked him what he did now. empty drums of printing ink; and a metal typewriter cover, painted Supratik said, 'Mter the publishing thing failed, I bought a black, with 'Remington' written on it. There was dust everywhere. couple of secondhand Japanese offset machines and became a It was as though, fifty or more years ago, the cabin's occupant job-printer. It may come as a surprise to you, but ninety per cent had gone home one evening and not returned, and no one had of the work I get has to do with printing study guides similar to entered the place since. the ones I had brought out. There is these days a guide available Supratik pulled out a book from the bottom drawer of his for every competitive exam and university course. The demand table and gave it to me to look at. It was the second edition of for them is far greater than for textbooks. Occasionally I get to Prasad's Medieval India, published in 1928. He said, 'I found it do confidential work, like printing examination papers. in one of the warehouses. It was the only copy left. I have rescued 'I got out of publishing, but The Indian Press still has a small a few interesting things in this way. Or at least what to me looked list. It consists of reprints of those of our old titles for which there interesting.' The book was heavier and thicker than I expected. is still a demand, like Meghnad Saha's Treatise on Heat. My uncle Bound in boards, it showed the 'Pillar of Victory at Chittore' on Satya Prasad, or Suttu Babu as everyone calls him, handles that the cover. Inside, the pages had generous margins, the printing side of the business. Some years ago we did another reprint of was clean, the paper had not yet turned brittle, and the repro- Ishwari Prasad's History of Medieval India. I was never a student duction quality of the twenty-one black-and-white photographs, ofEnglish, but I doubt any Indian historian these days can match on art paper, was surprisingly good. Ishwari Prasad's writing style.' I asked Supratik if I could buy a copy of the reprint and he asked a peon to get it. The ~a~erbackreprint, as far as the 2 8 Partial Recall Descendants 29 we continued for a couple of more years we had to close down Our next meeting was again during a power-cut, so I was sur- too. I have been with The Indian Press since. You could say I am prised to find there was light in the cabin. It came from a solitary a late entrant. 'I tried my hand at publishing at first and brought out a set of striplight suspended from the ceiling. In the background, I could six study guides, one on general knowledge, one on Indian history, hear the muffled sound of a genset. The ceiling, I noticed, was one on political science, and so on, aimed at candidates taking black with cobwebs and had wires stretched across it. Some of the Provincial Civil Service exam. The pides sold well, especially the wires led to a fan or to a light fixture, but often these were in the shops on University Road. The snag came when I went to missing, leaving the wires hanging. the booksellers to collect the money they owed me. They would Separating Supratik's cabin from the one adjoining it was a never say that they wouldn't pay, but all the same would fob me wooden partition with a door in the middle and glass panels on the sides. This time the door was open. I could see, in the other off with some excuse or other. Every few days I would make the # rounds on my scooter and come away empty-handed. In the end, cabin, a refrigerator that seemed to have been designed when Art unable to recover a single paisa, I lost interest in the project. It's a Deco was all the rage; an office table heaped with papers that had dirty market.' turned yellow; a revolving office chair with torn upholstery; two I asked him what he did now. empty drums of printing ink; and a metal typewriter cover, painted Supratik said, 'Mter the publishing thing failed, I bought a black, with 'Remington' written on it. There was dust everywhere. couple of secondhand Japanese offset machines and became a It was as though, fifty or more years ago, the cabin's occupant job-printer. It may come as a surprise to you, but ninety per cent had gone home one evening and not returned, and no one had of the work I get has to do with printing study guides similar to entered the place since. the ones I had brought out. There is these days a guide available Supratik pulled out a book from the bottom drawer of his for every competitive exam and university course. The demand table and gave it to me to look at. It was the second edition of for them is far greater than for textbooks. Occasionally I get to Prasad's Medieval India, published in 1928. He said, 'I found it do confidential work, like printing examination papers. in one of the warehouses. It was the only copy left. I have rescued 'I got out of publishing, but The Indian Press still has a small a few interesting things in this way. Or at least what to me looked list. It consists of reprints of those of our old titles for which there interesting.' The book was heavier and thicker than I expected. is still a demand, like Meghnad Saha's Treatise on Heat. My uncle Bound in boards, it showed the 'Pillar of Victory at Chittore' on Satya Prasad, or Suttu Babu as everyone calls him, handles that the cover. Inside, the pages had generous margins, the printing side of the business. Some years ago we did another reprint of was clean, the paper had not yet turned brittle, and the repro- Ishwari Prasad's History of Medieval India. I was never a student duction quality of the twenty-one black-and-white photographs, ofEnglish, but I doubt any Indian historian these days can match on art paper, was surprisingly good. Ishwari Prasad's writing style.' I asked Supratik if I could buy a copy of the reprint and he asked a peon to get it. The ~a~erbackreprint, as far as the 30 Partial Recall Descendants 3 1 production quality went, was no better than the dozens of cheap in earnest, I used to say like Oliver Goldsmith, "My publishers study guides displayed in the bookstalls on University Road. There are my patrons."' was no half-title page, nor was there a 'history' of the book, giving Suttu Babu had lived through the decline of The Indian Press, the date of first publication, and dates of subsequent revised edi- but he did not give me a chance to put any questions to him. He tions and reprints. Like the study guides, it was printed on cheap did not sit down. His cabin was behind the one adjoining Supra- newsprint-like paper. The photographs were a washout. tik's, and taking his leave he scurried towards it. I was still comparing the early edition with the recent reprint After he had left, Supratik reached for the bottom drawer of when Suttu Babu walked in. He was a delicate-looking man in his desk again and I thought he was going to show me another his early seventies and had a small clutch bag tucked under his book. Instead, he brought out a manila envelope and very gently arm. Supratik introduced us. pulled out a folded sheet that came apart even as he was pulling Suttu Babu said, 'Ishwari Prasad was a regular visitor to The it. Bits and pieces of the sheet liy scattered on the table, like the Indian Press. In his last years, when he could not move around pieces of a jigsaw. I could make out, in the pieces, a printed dia- much, I would go over to his house. He was at the time finishing gram with words and dates written in Bangla. Some words were a history of the French Revolution and a volume on the sources written in pencil. Supratik shrugged his shoulders and smiled. of Indian history. After his death, I asked his daughter about the He said, 'I thought I'd show you our family tree, but I didn't real- manuscripts, but she pretended as though she had never heard ize that the paper had become so brittle. There is a photocopy of of them. We were supposed to publish the bboks. I still have it at home and if you're interested I could bring it next time we the contracts.' meet.' He then proceeded to return the jigsaw to its envelope. I was hoping that Suttu Babu would sit down so I could ask him more about The Indian Press. His father, Hari Keshab, had been as much of an entrepreneur as Chintamoni. He continued with the printing and publishing businesses ofThe Indian Press, Ritu Rudra rose from her chair and, holding on to the furniture maintaining the same high standards, but also diversified into for support, taking one step at a time, asked me to follow her. At other areas. He started a sugar mill in Bihar and, in Allahabad, 78, she was naturally cautious in her movements, but her mental built market complexes and residential units which he rented out. agility was of someone sixty years younger. She had recently had When he died in 1953, Saraswati brought out a commemorat- a cataract removed and been operated on for breast cancer some ive issue, just as it had done for Chintamoni, consisting of tributes, years earlier, but her suffering then, she said, was nothing com- photographs, and messages. The opening tribute, in verse, was pared to what she went through after the cataract, when she was by Sumitranandan Pant. There was also a tribute by Ishwari unable to read or do the crossword for several weeks. She called it Prasad, who wrote, 'I had enjoyed his friendship uninterruptedly the worst period of her life. for more than three decades, and sometimes half in jest and half We went through the kitchen and came to a large bright room 30 Partial Recall Descendants 3 1 production quality went, was no better than the dozens of cheap in earnest, I used to say like Oliver Goldsmith, "My publishers study guides displayed in the bookstalls on University Road. There are my patrons."' was no half-title page, nor was there a 'history' of the book, giving Suttu Babu had lived through the decline of The Indian Press, the date of first publication, and dates of subsequent revised edi- but he did not give me a chance to put any questions to him. He tions and reprints. Like the study guides, it was printed on cheap did not sit down. His cabin was behind the one adjoining Supra- newsprint-like paper. The photographs were a washout. tik's, and taking his leave he scurried towards it. I was still comparing the early edition with the recent reprint After he had left, Supratik reached for the bottom drawer of when Suttu Babu walked in. He was a delicate-looking man in his desk again and I thought he was going to show me another his early seventies and had a small clutch bag tucked under his book. Instead, he brought out a manila envelope and very gently arm. Supratik introduced us. pulled out a folded sheet that came apart even as he was pulling Suttu Babu said, 'Ishwari Prasad was a regular visitor to The it. Bits and pieces of the sheet liy scattered on the table, like the Indian Press. In his last years, when he could not move around pieces of a jigsaw. I could make out, in the pieces, a printed dia- much, I would go over to his house. He was at the time finishing gram with words and dates written in Bangla. Some words were a history of the French Revolution and a volume on the sources written in pencil. Supratik shrugged his shoulders and smiled. of Indian history. After his death, I asked his daughter about the He said, 'I thought I'd show you our family tree, but I didn't real- manuscripts, but she pretended as though she had never heard ize that the paper had become so brittle. There is a photocopy of of them. We were supposed to publish the bboks. I still have it at home and if you're interested I could bring it next time we the contracts.' meet.' He then proceeded to return the jigsaw to its envelope. I was hoping that Suttu Babu would sit down so I could ask him more about The Indian Press. His father, Hari Keshab, had been as much of an entrepreneur as Chintamoni. He continued with the printing and publishing businesses ofThe Indian Press, Ritu Rudra rose from her chair and, holding on to the furniture maintaining the same high standards, but also diversified into for support, taking one step at a time, asked me to follow her. At other areas. He started a sugar mill in Bihar and, in Allahabad, 78, she was naturally cautious in her movements, but her mental built market complexes and residential units which he rented out. agility was of someone sixty years younger. She had recently had When he died in 1953, Saraswati brought out a commemorat- a cataract removed and been operated on for breast cancer some ive issue, just as it had done for Chintamoni, consisting of tributes, years earlier, but her suffering then, she said, was nothing com- photographs, and messages. The opening tribute, in verse, was pared to what she went through after the cataract, when she was by Sumitranandan Pant. There was also a tribute by Ishwari unable to read or do the crossword for several weeks. She called it Prasad, who wrote, 'I had enjoyed his friendship uninterruptedly the worst period of her life. for more than three decades, and sometimes half in jest and half We went through the kitchen and came to a large bright room 32 Partial Recall Descendants 33 at the back of the house. It seemed originally to have been a veran- Principal Rudra was Ritu's grandfather. dah and was scattered with books. I noticed a volume on Indian Ritu said, 'My geat-grandfather, Pyari Mohan Rudra, came birds, books on philosophy and religion, paperback novels. from a landowning family in Bengal and was baptised by the Despite the layer ofgammexane powder that lay on them, termites Scottish missionary Alexander Duff. The conversion caused a big had damaged the books and in some cases the holes were the size outcry in his native village and he could not return to it for a of a rupee coin. She looked around the room and apologized while, for fear of harm. He was, though, an educated man, having for the mess. gone to college in Calcutta. Drawn by the teachings of the scrip- She said, 'As you can see, we had to demolish half the bungalow. tures, he had converted by choice. Later, he joined the clergy and The new owners are putting up a school there. The demolition was in charge of the Nadiya Mission, with many congregations was too much to bear and I shifted to a friend's place when it under his care. I am told he wrote hymns in Bengali that are sung took place. I've just moved back and am still getting organized.' even today. We're not "rice chri;tiansn.' Finally, in a pile on the floor, she found what she was looking for. We returned to the living-room, which used to be her father's It was a book called Indian Christians: Biographical and Criti- study, and sat down again. A maid emerged from the kitchen cal Sketches, published by 'G.A. Natesan & Co., Madras', 'Price with two glasses of water on a tray. She said 'Good morning' to Rs Three', and contained biographies of Krishna Mohan Banerjea, me, using the English phrase, which took me by surprise. She ad- La1 Behari Day, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, W.T. Satthianadan, dressed Ritu as 'Ritu Baba' and they briefly discussed what the Pandita Ramabai, and Sushi1 Kumar Rudra. Rudra was the first maid was going to cook for lunch. Indian principal of St Stephen's College, Delhi, and a close The living-room had a red stone floor. The stones were hexa- associate of C.F. Andrews and Mahatma Gandhi. When he died gonal and formed a honeycomb pattern. The false ceiling had in 1925, Gandhi wrote in Young India, rotted away and been dismantled, exposing the rafters and the Ever since my return home in 19 15, I had been his guest whenever I undersides of the red roof tiles. The walls were a dark shade of had occasion to go to Delhi. . . . He was the first Indian Principal blue, the coat of whitewash showing under the paintwork, and chosen in his College. I, therefore, felt that his intimate association there were two skylights. Pushed against one of the walls was a with me and giving me shelter under his roof might compro~nise large oval dining-table, covered with a plastic sheet to protect the him and expose his College to unnecessary risk. I, therefore, offered linen tablecloth. On a couple of smaller tables on the opposite to seek shelter elsewhere. His reply was characteristic: 'My religion is wall were a Philips music system and stacks of cassettes and CDs. deeper than people may imagine. Some of my opinions are vital parts The music was Western classical, but not entirely. A corner table, of my being. They are formed after deep and prolonged prayers. near the entrance, was ~iledhiggledy-~i~~led~ with books and They are known to my English friends. I cannot possibly be misunder- stood by keeping you under my roof as an honoured friend and papers. The other furniture in the room consisted ofan assortment guest. And ifever I have to make a choice between losing what influ- of comfortable old chairs painted black, two old china-closets ence I may have among Englishmen and losing you, I know what I with straight legs, and a teapoy. Above the music system were would choose. You cannot leave me.' photographs of Ritu's parents. Her father's face was intense, 32 Partial Recall Descendants 33 at the back of the house. It seemed originally to have been a veran- Principal Rudra was Ritu's grandfather. dah and was scattered with books. I noticed a volume on Indian Ritu said, 'My geat-grandfather, Pyari Mohan Rudra, came birds, books on philosophy and religion, paperback novels. from a landowning family in Bengal and was baptised by the Despite the layer ofgammexane powder that lay on them, termites Scottish missionary Alexander Duff. The conversion caused a big had damaged the books and in some cases the holes were the size outcry in his native village and he could not return to it for a of a rupee coin. She looked around the room and apologized while, for fear of harm. He was, though, an educated man, having for the mess. gone to college in Calcutta. Drawn by the teachings of the scrip- She said, 'As you can see, we had to demolish half the bungalow. tures, he had converted by choice. Later, he joined the clergy and The new owners are putting up a school there. The demolition was in charge of the Nadiya Mission, with many congregations was too much to bear and I shifted to a friend's place when it under his care. I am told he wrote hymns in Bengali that are sung took place. I've just moved back and am still getting organized.' even today. We're not "rice chri;tiansn.' Finally, in a pile on the floor, she found what she was looking for. We returned to the living-room, which used to be her father's It was a book called Indian Christians: Biographical and Criti- study, and sat down again. A maid emerged from the kitchen cal Sketches, published by 'G.A. Natesan & Co., Madras', 'Price with two glasses of water on a tray. She said 'Good morning' to Rs Three', and contained biographies of Krishna Mohan Banerjea, me, using the English phrase, which took me by surprise. She ad- La1 Behari Day, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, W.T. Satthianadan, dressed Ritu as 'Ritu Baba' and they briefly discussed what the Pandita Ramabai, and Sushi1 Kumar Rudra. Rudra was the first maid was going to cook for lunch. Indian principal of St Stephen's College, Delhi, and a close The living-room had a red stone floor. The stones were hexa- associate of C.F. Andrews and Mahatma Gandhi. When he died gonal and formed a honeycomb pattern. The false ceiling had in 1925, Gandhi wrote in Young India, rotted away and been dismantled, exposing the rafters and the Ever since my return home in 19 15, I had been his guest whenever I undersides of the red roof tiles. The walls were a dark shade of had occasion to go to Delhi. . . . He was the first Indian Principal blue, the coat of whitewash showing under the paintwork, and chosen in his College. I, therefore, felt that his intimate association there were two skylights. Pushed against one of the walls was a with me and giving me shelter under his roof might compro~nise large oval dining-table, covered with a plastic sheet to protect the him and expose his College to unnecessary risk. I, therefore, offered linen tablecloth. On a couple of smaller tables on the opposite to seek shelter elsewhere. His reply was characteristic: 'My religion is wall were a Philips music system and stacks of cassettes and CDs. deeper than people may imagine. Some of my opinions are vital parts The music was Western classical, but not entirely. A corner table, of my being. They are formed after deep and prolonged prayers. near the entrance, was ~iledhiggledy-~i~~led~ with books and They are known to my English friends. I cannot possibly be misunder- stood by keeping you under my roof as an honoured friend and papers. The other furniture in the room consisted ofan assortment guest. And ifever I have to make a choice between losing what influ- of comfortable old chairs painted black, two old china-closets ence I may have among Englishmen and losing you, I know what I with straight legs, and a teapoy. Above the music system were would choose. You cannot leave me.' photographs of Ritu's parents. Her father's face was intense, Descendants 3 7 3 6 Partial Recall They had all come inside the living-room, made their deliveries, Ritu said, 'My father and Amaranatha Jha were friends but and left, and seemed well versed in the ways of the house. There they were never very close. Jha was an elitist. He set great store by were hardly any words exchanged between them and Ritu. The a student's family background, particularly when he was admitting dhobi's family had worked for the Rudras for three generations. one to Muir Hostel, of which he was Warden. My father, who The gandfather, Sarju, Ritu recalled, always wore a pugree, a was an egalitarian, treated everyone the same. Jha's wife, though, tight-fitting tunic, and a dhoti. He wore a gold earring in one ear was the opposite of her husband. She was a down-to-earth village and brought the week's washing on the back of a donkey. woman from Bihar and did not know a word of English. I have a On a subsequent visit, Ritu had mentioned her father's diary, memory of her sitting in the courtyard of her house, chopping adding that she did not know where it was and that it would be vegetables. She was very traditional. I never saw her wearing a difficult to find. From time to time, I would remind her of it, blouse or appearing in public. Even when there was a dinner and though she promised she wopld ask her sister Dipika to look, at the Jhas, she did not come out to meet the guests. was as It I was doubtful that it would ever turn up. though Jha was embarrassed by her. On these occasions my Dipika was the youngest of Sudhir Kumar's five daughters. mother went across to help with the arrangements and played Married to a Keralite, she had spent most of her time in South the role of hostess.' India, but returned to live in her father's house, the house in As we talked, a man dressed in a white shirt and white pyjamas which she was born, after her husband's death. Ritu herself had came and stood in the front door. He said 'Salaam huzoor' and, never married. She had always lived in Allahabad and, before shuffling off his chappals, sat down in the chair nearest the retirement, taught philosophy at Ewing Christian College. She entrance. He sat on the edge of the chair, as though uncomfortable had a doctorate from Claremont and had taught at Columbia in it. The glasses he wore had thick lenses, behind which his eyes University for a year. A third sister who stayed in the house appeared to be of a grey colour. He had several teeth missing and was Pramila. She had retired from her teaching job at Lawrence looked very frail. After a while, Ritu asked him to go inside into School, Sanawar. the kitchen. Then one day Dipika called to say that she had found the Ritu said, 'He's our tailor Kadir Bux. He had a shop in Civil diary. Lines, but the building was pulled down last year and a multiplex Since Jha and Rudra had been contemporaries, and both had is coming up in its place. He now makes a round of his old custom- taught at the same university and moved in the same circles, it ers and takes home whatever work he gets. My sisters and I try had crossed my mind, when I first heard about it, that Rudra's to give him something to mend or stitch whenever he comes. diary might not be very different from Jha's. I could not have He also gets a cup of tea and a bit to eat. He usually turns up been more wrong. around lunchtime.' Jha's diary had read like an engagement book. It enumerated, Kadir Bux was not the only one who had visited Ritu that nearly always without comment, the names of the people he'd morning. Before him the milkman, the meatman, the fishmonger, met ('February 6 1930: Called on Mrs Naidu at Anand Bhavan. the fruit and vegetable vendors, and the dhobi had been there. Descendants 3 7 3 6 Partial Recall They had all come inside the living-room, made their deliveries, Ritu said, 'My father and Amaranatha Jha were friends but and left, and seemed well versed in the ways of the house. There they were never very close. Jha was an elitist. He set great store by were hardly any words exchanged between them and Ritu. The a student's family background, particularly when he was admitting dhobi's family had worked for the Rudras for three generations. one to Muir Hostel, of which he was Warden. My father, who The gandfather, Sarju, Ritu recalled, always wore a pugree, a was an egalitarian, treated everyone the same. Jha's wife, though, tight-fitting tunic, and a dhoti. He wore a gold earring in one ear was the opposite of her husband. She was a down-to-earth village and brought the week's washing on the back of a donkey. woman from Bihar and did not know a word of English. I have a On a subsequent visit, Ritu had mentioned her father's diary, memory of her sitting in the courtyard of her house, chopping adding that she did not know where it was and that it would be vegetables. She was very traditional. I never saw her wearing a difficult to find. From time to time, I would remind her of it, blouse or appearing in public. Even when there was a dinner and though she promised she wopld ask her sister Dipika to look, at the Jhas, she did not come out to meet the guests. was as It I was doubtful that it would ever turn up. though Jha was embarrassed by her. On these occasions my Dipika was the youngest of Sudhir Kumar's five daughters. mother went across to help with the arrangements and played Married to a Keralite, she had spent most of her time in South the role of hostess.' India, but returned to live in her father's house, the house in As we talked, a man dressed in a white shirt and white pyjamas which she was born, after her husband's death. Ritu herself had came and stood in the front door. He said 'Salaam huzoor' and, never married. She had always lived in Allahabad and, before shuffling off his chappals, sat down in the chair nearest the retirement, taught philosophy at Ewing Christian College. She entrance. He sat on the edge of the chair, as though uncomfortable had a doctorate from Claremont and had taught at Columbia in it. The glasses he wore had thick lenses, behind which his eyes University for a year. A third sister who stayed in the house appeared to be of a grey colour. He had several teeth missing and was Pramila. She had retired from her teaching job at Lawrence looked very frail. After a while, Ritu asked him to go inside into School, Sanawar. the kitchen. Then one day Dipika called to say that she had found the Ritu said, 'He's our tailor Kadir Bux. He had a shop in Civil diary. Lines, but the building was pulled down last year and a multiplex Since Jha and Rudra had been contemporaries, and both had is coming up in its place. He now makes a round of his old custom- taught at the same university and moved in the same circles, it ers and takes home whatever work he gets. My sisters and I try had crossed my mind, when I first heard about it, that Rudra's to give him something to mend or stitch whenever he comes. diary might not be very different from Jha's. I could not have He also gets a cup of tea and a bit to eat. He usually turns up been more wrong. around lunchtime.' Jha's diary had read like an engagement book. It enumerated, Kadir Bux was not the only one who had visited Ritu that nearly always without comment, the names of the people he'd morning. Before him the milkman, the meatman, the fishmonger, met ('February 6 1930: Called on Mrs Naidu at Anand Bhavan. the fruit and vegetable vendors, and the dhobi had been there. 38 Partial Recall Descendants 39

Met Padmaja also'), the functions he'd attended ('February 5 192 1: With an openness that is entirely beguiling and with a poet's eye Boy Scouts' Rally in honour of Lord Baden-Powell'), and the for detail, he writes about the early years of his marriage and the meetings he'd chaired ('September 29 1923: I presided over rented Muir Road bungalow in which those years were spent; Professor Seshadri's lecture on "Love Poetry in English"'), with about the birth of his children and of two deaths; about making sometimes a glance at the day's ~oliticalevents ('March 11 1922: a sandpit and falling off a horse; about the purchase of a Fiat Mr Gandhi has been arrested'). Rarely does Jha refer to anything motorcar and, in 1932, of 20 Albert Road, the very house in personal, and when he does he adopts the same dry, slightly gruff which, sitting in a black armchair, I was reading the diary; and tone. On the day of his marriage, for instance, he wrote, 'June 22 about the recruitment and dismissal of servants: 1922: I was married at Bettiah at midday to the youngest daughter of the late Pandit Harimohan Jha.' One of the few exceptions to We have a cook, Abdul, who is a funny kind of bloke. I took him on this is when he was finally leaving the university, after being asso- when Mohini [Rudra's wife] was away in Lahore, expecting Bobby. He seemed to be a smart bearer jnd produced good chits. Mohini ciated with it for thirty years, to become chairman of the Public once got very angry with him and dismissed him. I am sorry I Service Commission, Uttar Pradesh. On 31 March 1947 he con- interfered and had him reinstated. Now he has hung around. He is fided to his diary, 'I wrote to Kewal Krishna and Ramji-and jolly dirty, an absolute pig. I shudder to think he is our cook! I wish wept as I wrote, making over charge of the Muir Hostel to them. we could replace him. This summer, 1938, he nearly died of enteric. No one can realize what these boys have meant to a lonely man.' After all the self-importance, all the honours-Fellow of the Apart from the diary, 'The Rudra Book', as the family has Royal Society of Literature, President of the All-India Lawn Tennis always called the custom-made ruled notebook, contained the Association, and so on-this comes as a shock. The Jhas did not children's medical records and details of investments and expenses. have any children of their own, which may explain the sense of These were in Mohini Rudra's hand. There were also, loosely loneliness he felt. He died in 1955. His enormous up-to-date kept between its pages, a few old receipts and letters, the latter library, consisting of several thousand titles, some of which, like still in the envelopes in which they were received. They were letters Ezra Pound's Quia Pauper Amavi (Egoist Press, 19 19), would of condolence received by the family when Sudhir Kumar died. today fetch good prices on the rare books market, was bequeathed Ritu had often talked about the family vacations in Ramgarh, to the university, where, in the fitness ofthings, maggots reduced Binsar, and Ranikhet in the Kumaon hills. She remembered them most of it to powder. His papers, which included a complete mainly for the long walks, like the one from Binsar to Almora, a translation of the seventeenth-century Hindi poet Bihari, were distance of fourteen miles. But on that occasion she had not either lost or destroyed. walked and her father had had to carry her on his shoulders for Despite the reserve, Jha's diary was a window into the social most of the distance. Though a coolie had accompanied them, and cultural world of Allahabad of the 1 920s, 1930s, and 1940s; she refused to go to him, unable to bear his smell. Her mother, Rudra's, covering the same period, is centred on its domestic life. on these walks, would point out the wild flowers along the way 38 Partial Recall Descendants 39

and identi+ them for the children. When they returned to the could jump, separated the compounds. The bungalow was for a cottage hired for the season-it was often set amidst an orchard- while occupied by an English family who were in the carpet busi- a meal, made by a cook who had travelled with them from ness, and then by a down-at-heel Anglo-Indian who was a tenant. Allahabad, would be awaiting them. The other servant who had One morning, he turned up outside his neighbour Sudhir Kumar's travelled with them was the sweeper, whose hereditary job was to gate, and after borrowing money from him disappeared without clean out the commodes. trace. It later came out that he owed money all round, including But the Rudras when they went on vacation took more than rent to his landlord. servants with them. Two pages in the diary gave a list of 'Vacation The next owner was a young Nepalese rana, a man called Requisites', itemized under seven headings, 'Bedding', 'Tiffin Balendu Shah. He liked to live well, and had the means to do so. basket', 'Toilet', 'Bathroom', 'Bedroom', Drawing-room', and The first thing he did when he moved into the house was to 'Dining-room'. The 'requisites', about a hundred-odd in number, order some high-quality European-style furniture. In local included mosquito nets, plates, cups and saucers, a butter dish, sporting circles, where he was a familiar figure, he was known toothpicks, tablecloths, a tin-opener, brandy, Listerine, carbolic not for his money but his cricketing abilities. He was a fine bat. It soap, coat hangers, Bromo paper, buckets, soap dishes, face towels, was from him that in the late 1940s Khelat Chandra Bhattacharya phenol, curtains, vases, cushions, rugs, ashtrays, visiting cards, purchased the bungalow, the furniture included. Khelat Chandra cigarettes, a cruet-stand, mustard, forks, knives, spoons, table- was Arun Kumar's uncle. He was a retired civil surgeon, but those cloths, soup plates, milk jugs, eggcups, serviettes, dishcloths, and who remembered him spoke of him in soldierly terms. They des- finger bowls. Also forming part of the luggage, Pramila once told cribed him as a man of 'military bearing', as someone who stood me, was a gramophone, gramophone records, a carrom board, 'ramrod straight'. and a stack of storybooks from which Sudhir Kumar sometimes The Bhattacharyas were from Shantipur in West Bengal, and read aloud. Arun Kumar's father may have been the first one in the family to The bungalow may have had a fixed address, like, say, 20 Albert leave the village in search of a new life. He came and settled in Road, but when the residents moved it moved with them. The Benares, and got a job in a college there. Arun Kumar, who grew bungalow was a way of life, and while it lasted it was portable. up in Benares, came to Allahabad in 1944, to do his BSc. He must have impressed Arnaranatha Jha, who admitted him to Muir Hostel, which in those days was the most anglicized of the university hostels and difficult to get into. (In the 1940s, 'Murian' had Adjacent to the Rudra house, facing Thornhill Road, was the the same ring that 'Stephanian' has today.) He stayed there two bungalow in which Arun Kumar Bhattacharya lived. The two years and completed his degree. What he did after that no one bungalows were identical and built around the same time, in the knows. As one of his closest friends said to me, 'There's a gap in first decade of the last century. A low brick wall, which any child the story.' 40 Partial Recall Descendants 4 1

Arun Kumar returned to the university in 1950, to do his MA chairs and a sideboard. He asked Rs 55,000 for them. Mrs Khelat in English literature. This time he did not seek admission to Muir Chandra had meanwhile died. Hostel but stayed with Khelat Chandra at 24 Thornhill Road. Ten years later, Arun Kumar was still living there, in the same He stayed in one room at the rear of the house and had his meals corner bungalow on Thornhill Road he had first come to as a with the family. Since he was not married, he continued to student. He had been living there for forty-five years and had live there, in that one room, even after he started teaching at grown used to the place. He was 70 years old and it would have the university. seemed very unlikely to him that he was ever going to leave and After Khelat Chandra's death, the responsibility of taking care move into his flat. He got a good price for the flat and sold it off. of his old wife, and indeed of the house and the Ambassador car, As for the car, despite a few engine problems, it still enabled him the same one in which I would see him driving around, fell largely to get around. He saw no call to change the car either. on Arun Kumar. Though the Chandras had children of their Meanwhile, land prices in Allafiabad had skyrocketed and the own, a son and a daughter, they lived elsewhere, not in Allahabad. building mafia was eyeing Khelat Chandra's property. It was almost he son was in Calcutta, where he worked for Martin Burn, two acres of land, enough to build at least twenty independent and he later settled in America. Arun Kumar, driving back from houses on. Arun Kumar's cousin, Khelat Chandra's son, was keen the university or from Civil Lines in his uncle's car, must have to sell, and even turned up one year in Allahabad with the in- sometimes felt that he was returning not to his uncle's house but tention of finalizing a deal, but with Arun Kumar refusing to to his own. move out, the sale fell through. On that occasion, to everyone's 'Batty did not have to buy a spoon in his life', was a remark I surprise, Arun Kumar produced Mrs Khelat Chandra's will (some heard often when I asked my older colleagues about him. Batty, say it was a letter written by her). It stated that the bungalow was as his friends called Arun Kumar, also had the reputation of to go to her son, but Arun Kumar could live in it for his lifetime. being a miser. He certainly had the money, earned during stints The only condition was that he had to maintain the bungalow of school-teaching abroad, to back the reputation. When they and pay the house and water taxes, a negligible sum of a few went to the Coffee House, 1was told, Batty was always the last in hundred rupees annually. the company to reach for his wallet. He paid only if someone else The episode had left Arun Kumar badly shaken. He confided had not paid for him and usually someone had. to a friend that for the first time he had started feeling unsafe in By the time he retired in 1985, Arun Kumar had bought his the house. Since he had a heart condition and lived alone, he own place, a modest two-bedroom Allahabad Development worried that there was no one around to call out to should he Authority flat on the fourth floor, but he continued to live in the need medical help at night. He looked more apprehensive, his bungalow and to rent out the flat. At about this time, in the mid- friend said, than he had ever seen him. 1980s, he tried to sell off some of the Balendu Shah furniture: a Ritu remembers the date, 12 May 1995, even today. She had C. Lazarus of Calcutta mahogany !gate-leg dining-table with eight just finished watching The World This Week on TV,when she 44 Partial Recall Descendants 4 5 heard a banging on the door. Outside she found her servants 'Unfortunately, the person who had contacted him misunder- standing in a huddle. Their quarters were close by, in a lane that stood the message. He thought the brother had asked them to ran along one side of her property, but since they were not usually wait. In the forty-eight hours it took the brother to get here, the awake at that hour she was surprised to see them. body had become so bloated and it stank so much that no It was the wedding season and the servants had been waiting cne was prepared to go inside. In the end, they had to ply one for the barat to arrive. A few people were waiting on the road, of the sweepers with a lot of booze before he agreed to get the and had seen three men jump over her compound wall. One of body out.' the men had washed himself at the hand pump outside the lane Less than a month later, 24 Thornhill Road was demolished. and gone off in the direction of the Anglo-Indian Colony. The other two had left on a scooter that was parked not far from her 'gate. They were in a hurry to get away. It all looked very suspicious and the servants had come out of concern, to check if everything was all right. When my father, a dentist, came to Allahabad from Dehra Dun Ritu said, 'I double-checked all my doors and locks, and finding in 1949, we first stayed with his elder brother at 20 Hastings everything was in order went to bed. I heard about it only the Road. We did not live in the main bungalow but in a cottage at next morning and immediately went across. He was lying on the the back. It had a pitched roof, tiny rooms, a coal-trough, a front floor, wearing blue pyjamas and a half-sleeve shirt, his hands not verandah, and an oleander hedge. I call it a cottage because of its straight by his side but raised to about the level of his shoulders. size and appearance, though at the time it was built it would have There was a piece of electrical flex round his neck, the ends of the been the kitchen and pantry, which in the colonial bungalow flex touching the palms. I recognized a journalist from the Patrika were not attached to the main house but located a short distance in the crowd and asked him what he knew. He gestured towards from it. After two years of living in the cottage, we moved to the men from the police station and said he had been told that Ghosh Building on Albert Road, in the heart of Civil Lines, where Arun Kumar suffered from depression and had committed suicide. my father had set up his clinic. We would have been among the He tended to believe them. I said this was nonsense. I had known first people to live in a flat in Allahabad. Arun Kumar for years and he was not the suicidal type. He was a Ghosh Building was built in the same year that we came to fighter. In any case, it was impossible for a person to strangulate Allahabad. It was a long, flat-roofed, modern-looking building, himself in this fashion, lying on the floor. and lacked only chimneys to make it look like a factory. At street 'But what happened subsequently is even more horrifying. Arun level, after a walkway that ran along the length of the building, Kumar's closest surviving relative was his brother in Poona. He was a row of about a dozen large shops with glass fronts. Upstairs said that since it would take him two days to reach Allahabad, were flats and insurance offices. Over the decades, the shops have they should go ahead with the cremation. changed hands and new businesses have opened in them. But 44 Partial Recall Descendants 4 5 heard a banging on the door. Outside she found her servants 'Unfortunately, the person who had contacted him misunder- standing in a huddle. Their quarters were close by, in a lane that stood the message. He thought the brother had asked them to ran along one side of her property, but since they were not usually wait. In the forty-eight hours it took the brother to get here, the awake at that hour she was surprised to see them. body had become so bloated and it stank so much that no It was the wedding season and the servants had been waiting cne was prepared to go inside. In the end, they had to ply one for the barat to arrive. A few people were waiting on the road, of the sweepers with a lot of booze before he agreed to get the and had seen three men jump over her compound wall. One of body out.' the men had washed himself at the hand pump outside the lane Less than a month later, 24 Thornhill Road was demolished. and gone off in the direction of the Anglo-Indian Colony. The other two had left on a scooter that was parked not far from her 'gate. They were in a hurry to get away. It all looked very suspicious and the servants had come out of concern, to check if everything was all right. When my father, a dentist, came to Allahabad from Dehra Dun Ritu said, 'I double-checked all my doors and locks, and finding in 1949, we first stayed with his elder brother at 20 Hastings everything was in order went to bed. I heard about it only the Road. We did not live in the main bungalow but in a cottage at next morning and immediately went across. He was lying on the the back. It had a pitched roof, tiny rooms, a coal-trough, a front floor, wearing blue pyjamas and a half-sleeve shirt, his hands not verandah, and an oleander hedge. I call it a cottage because of its straight by his side but raised to about the level of his shoulders. size and appearance, though at the time it was built it would have There was a piece of electrical flex round his neck, the ends of the been the kitchen and pantry, which in the colonial bungalow flex touching the palms. I recognized a journalist from the Patrika were not attached to the main house but located a short distance in the crowd and asked him what he knew. He gestured towards from it. After two years of living in the cottage, we moved to the men from the police station and said he had been told that Ghosh Building on Albert Road, in the heart of Civil Lines, where Arun Kumar suffered from depression and had committed suicide. my father had set up his clinic. We would have been among the He tended to believe them. I said this was nonsense. I had known first people to live in a flat in Allahabad. Arun Kumar for years and he was not the suicidal type. He was a Ghosh Building was built in the same year that we came to fighter. In any case, it was impossible for a person to strangulate Allahabad. It was a long, flat-roofed, modern-looking building, himself in this fashion, lying on the floor. and lacked only chimneys to make it look like a factory. At street 'But what happened subsequently is even more horrifying. Arun level, after a walkway that ran along the length of the building, Kumar's closest surviving relative was his brother in Poona. He was a row of about a dozen large shops with glass fronts. Upstairs said that since it would take him two days to reach Allahabad, were flats and insurance offices. Over the decades, the shops have they should go ahead with the cremation. changed hands and new businesses have opened in them. But 46 Partial Recall Descendants 47 some establishments, like Kohli Photo Service, which fifty years from a nondescript provincial town into one of the premier cities ago was just the sort of state-of-the-art ~hoto~rapherin town of the Raj have turned it into a provincial town once again, whose that J.M. Patell had found to be a threat, and Indian Medical unchecked gowth and collapsed civic amenities make it indistin- Hall, a Bengali-owned rundown chemist that even today from a guishable from dozens of other towns in North India. Seen in considerable distance smells like an old bandage, have been there this way, Allahabad's is a terribly human story. It is a story of dust since my childhood. to dust, which may be one reason why some of us who live in it The clinic took up the front part of our flat, which meant that love it so much. one entered the flat through the waiting-room. Behind it was a drawing-room and a dining area. The two bedrooms were to one side. Behind the dining area was a narrow balcony, at one end of which was a kitchen, whose inside was black with smoke from the chulha, and at the other a flush toilet, which was something of a novelty. The other novelty, for me, was our Electrolux refrigerator that ran on kerosene. Ghosh Building was one of several rental properties, spread across Allahabad, owned by The Indian Press. In the last one hundred and fifty years Allahabad has seen two migrations. The first began after the Mutiny of 1857 and ended a hundred years later, in the first decade after Independence. During it came the Ghoshs and the Chatterjces, the Nehrus and the Dhondys, and the Jhas and the Rudras. It made Allahabad what it was. The second migration, which began in the 1980s, has been largely a local affair; from the Black Town to the White, from Chowk to Civil Lines, from Attarsuiya to Thornhill Road. It unmade the colonial city. Like my parents, Arun Kumar had come to Allahabad towards the end of the first migration. He saw the second one coming but badly misjudged it. Instead of showing prudence and stepping out of its way, he dug in and paid the price. Allahabad has paid a price too. The second migration has dealt it a blow it is unlikely to recover from. The same forces of history that transformed it 46 Partial Recall Descendants 47 some establishments, like Kohli Photo Service, which fifty years from a nondescript provincial town into one of the premier cities ago was just the sort of state-of-the-art ~hoto~rapherin town of the Raj have turned it into a provincial town once again, whose that J.M. Patell had found to be a threat, and Indian Medical unchecked gowth and collapsed civic amenities make it indistin- Hall, a Bengali-owned rundown chemist that even today from a guishable from dozens of other towns in North India. Seen in considerable distance smells like an old bandage, have been there this way, Allahabad's is a terribly human story. It is a story of dust since my childhood. to dust, which may be one reason why some of us who live in it The clinic took up the front part of our flat, which meant that love it so much. one entered the flat through the waiting-room. Behind it was a drawing-room and a dining area. The two bedrooms were to one side. Behind the dining area was a narrow balcony, at one end of which was a kitchen, whose inside was black with smoke from the chulha, and at the other a flush toilet, which was something of a novelty. The other novelty, for me, was our Electrolux refrigerator that ran on kerosene. Ghosh Building was one of several rental properties, spread across Allahabad, owned by The Indian Press. In the last one hundred and fifty years Allahabad has seen two migrations. The first began after the Mutiny of 1857 and ended a hundred years later, in the first decade after Independence. During it came the Ghoshs and the Chatterjces, the Nehrus and the Dhondys, and the Jhas and the Rudras. It made Allahabad what it was. The second migration, which began in the 1980s, has been largely a local affair; from the Black Town to the White, from Chowk to Civil Lines, from Attarsuiya to Thornhill Road. It unmade the colonial city. Like my parents, Arun Kumar had come to Allahabad towards the end of the first migration. He saw the second one coming but badly misjudged it. Instead of showing prudence and stepping out of its way, he dug in and paid the price. Allahabad has paid a price too. The second migration has dealt it a blow it is unlikely to recover from. The same forces of history that transformed it Partial Recall 49

against my skin. We'd sit on the embankment to dry ourselves, then go home. The boys I played cricket with, or hockey, or soccer, or with Partial Recall whom I went swimming, have today become unsubstantial as ghosts. Ask me their names or what they looked like or their fathers' professions, and my mind is more or less blank. The person who still seems real from that time is someone I didn't know at all. She was a businessman's daughter I was in love with in school. We never talked, but on some pretext or other I would fre- The brand new cricket bat, with Len Hutton's signature inscribed quently go past her classroom, trying hard not to look in its near the top of the blade, where it joins the handle, stood in a direction; in the recess I would' follow her around; and before shallow pan half filled with linseed oil. The bat was supposed to going to sleep at night, in the privacy of the mosquito net, the soak up the oil through a tiny hole in the bottom, and I went and bedside lamp switched off, the pedestal fan purring, my eyes half checked it from time to time. Seeing at the end of three days that closed, I would murmur her name to myself over and over again. nothing was happening, I took the bat out of the pan and vigor- But there were also nights, specially in the summer, when the full ously rubbed the oil into it with a cotton rag. Finally, I took a cork moon would creep up the window and refuse to go away, throwing ball and bounced it off the blade, each thud leaving a dark- its unwanted light both on the world I was about to shut out and coloured sunken mark on the smooth surface. Looking at the the hidden one I wished to enter, trapping me between them. I lay disfigured face of the bat afterwards, I almost regretted what as though suspended in the air. If I attempted to bring thedarkness I'd done. back by covering my eyes with a pillow, the moonbeams pinned Whenever I made it to a cricket eleven, it was more on the my arms down so I couldn't move. strength of the equipment I brought along than for any cricketing The evenings, too, went in trying to catch a glimpse ofher face, abilities I possessed. for which purpose I would go past her house on my Raleigh bi- I don't recall my boyhood, uneventful though it was, as being cycle at regular fifteen-minute intervals. She had large black eyes, particularly lonely. Without telling our parents, we'd go swimming high cheekbones, sloping shoulders, wide hips, and a slow, deli- in a lake. It was full of tall, offensive weeds that came up almost to berate walk. Her complexion was the colour of wheat, and often, the water's surface. We'd strip to our underpants and, from a con- even at home, she wore the white blouse and sky-blue skirt of the crete platform that abutted the lake, jump into the water. The school uniform. weeds seemed to follow us around and I was afraid they might, A bicycle may be a noiseless way of getting around, but any moment, grab hold of my leg and drag me to the bottom. whenever I approached the street in which she lived, the tyres (as I'd thrash about violently if one of them so much as brushed if I'd upset a basket of snakes) began to hiss, the leather saddle Partial Recall 49

creaked, the chain rattled against the chain guard, and it felt like yellow, pink, or brick red on the outside. Ours was a semi- 1 was travelling in a fire engine instead. If there was light in her detached in Sector 10. It consisted of a living room, two ten-by- window I'd turn back and cross it a second time, all the while ten-feet bedrooms, a kitchen with a cement counter, a verandah looking out for her cousin who was the same age as me and sus- just big enough to accommodate one rattan chair and some pected what was going on. But he also knew that my evening flowerpots, and an enclosed backyard on whose whitewashed routine was harmless and didn't interfere with it. walls no papaya tree cast its thin shadow. There still lingered in the Despite the hundreds ofhours spent in this pursuit, had she and rooms the wholesome smell of sawdust and fresh paint when we I met by accident somewhere, say on a desert island, I wouldn't moved in, and some ofthe paint was splattered on the floor, form- have known what to say to her. Her presence I was unused to, ing strings of islands. Blobs of grey plaster clung to the window whereas her absence summoned all my latent powers. Like the bars. You looked out and saw that for miles around there was noth- pigeon that seems to exist just outside the boundaries of the magi- ing outlined against the sky. Th'e sky itselfwas flat, curvatureless, cian's person, and which he makes appear simply by passing a and like a weight kept pressing everything down into the earth- cloth over his hand, I believed she too could be conjured up, houses, fences, utility poles, everything. This is not all. The place and I was the one to do it. Sitting in class or fielding at deep third had the stillness of a morgue. There was little traffic on the roads man, I'd snap my fingers and look about me to see if her languid and none whatsoever in the air. No butterfly flitted past, though figure had materialized, but except that words disappeared from you could have sat in theverandah all afternoon. At such times, the the blackboard before I took them down or I gave away an extra only movement was that of your eyes, when they blinked; the run, little else happened. I realize now that I was driven not only only sound came when someone cleared a spot of phlegm from his by my infatuation with her but also by some image I had ofmyself, throat, and Bandhu Ram cleared his constantly. an image which formed only when she became the looking glass. Like a stain preserved in cloth, Bandhu Ram is preserved in the We were living in Bhilai, a city designed by a pencil stub and a folds of my memory. Half-crouched and without making a sound, six-inch plastic ruler. It was all parallel lines. The tribal village that he approaches the coal enclosure behind which a chicken, that gave it its name was nowhere to be seen, and in its place, in the a minute ago was fluttering all over the yard, has hidden itself. middle of the mineral-rich Deccan plateau-a region that once Bandhu Ram was a slender dark-complexioned man who didn't formed part of the hypothetical continent of Gondwanaland- speak even when spoken to. His family since his grandfather's time stood rows of mostly one-storey houses with flat concrete roofs. had worked in the kitchens of regimental messes, and from it he There were so many houses to a street, so many streets to a sector, had inherited the art of baking vegetables, steaming puddings, and ten sectors made the township. At one end of this, next to the and making clear soups that sometimes tasted like hot water. He lake where we went swimming, a steel plant was being built with used to be our cook in Allahabad and came to Bhilai with us when Soviet aid. my father, who was a dentist, took up a job in a newly opened The pencil and ruler that planned the city also drew its houses. hospital there. Once a month he wrote to his family. Bringing They were toy houses really, rectangular in shape and coloured me a postcard, he'd start dictating the letter, 'Bandhu Ram conveys 5 0 Partial Recall Partial Recall 5 1

his greetings to everyone . . .' The contents never varied, and soon Though aboard the stamp album's magic carpet I made frequent I knew them by heart. visits to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and less frequent From the doorway I had watched the chicken's flight and cap- ones to Borneo, Cameroon, Formosa, Gold Coast, Madagascar, ture. Bandhu Ram went outside, holding the chicken upside Rhodesia, Siam, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar, it was not philately down in one hand and a rusty knife in the other. He had his back or even the sight of blast furnaces and coke ovens which made towards me. I wanted to go and stand near him, but didn't have the highest point of my otherwise plain boyhood. That dot on the courage. Then I saw him wipe the knife on the grass. Around the contour map still belonged to the girl I had partly daydreamt him lay stiffwhite feathers. I was watching his face when he came into existence. Was I sorry to see my boyhood end? Not really, in, but it was impassive, as my own must have been when after- for whatever the rites depassage might say, I never did believe it wards at dinner I sucked on the wishbone. had ended. Unlike us, the Soviet engineers lived in air-conditioned apart- r ments from which, when the door opened, came the smell of e frying. Without realizing it, we were a nuisance to them. Every schoolboy in Bhilai was an ardent hobbyist and had picked up In July 1963, just out of high school and after five years of living enough Russian to ask for postage stamps, coins, and brooches in a steel town, I found myself on the train back to Allahabad. (depicting naval ships, Lenin, the hammer and sickle), and say No two cities could be more different. One had not yet made it to thank you. An afternoon of knocking on doors seldom produc- the map of India, the other had been a continuous settlement ed more than a few postage stamps, though on lucky days one or for thousands ofyears, visited by mythological heroes and ancient another of those oversized Soviet women would give us a one- travellers, and mentioned in sacred texts; one adjoined a man- kopeck coin, and sometimes a crumpled rouble note. Limited made lake, the other lay at the confluence of three rivers, the though our contact with them was, even as children we could see Ganges, the Jamuna, and the invisible Saraswati; one was small that between them and us language was not the only barrier. My but cosmopolitan, the other large and provincial, a one-horse badminton partner in the club was a Russian. A thickset man with town of half a million souls; one was in the process of coming up, short hair and the grace ofa battletank, he seemed to want to crush the other, described even by local journalists as a dead place, the shuttlecock whenever he made contact. We became friends, seemed content to remain in perpetual decline. I fell in with its though only on court. Off it he refused to recognize me. By and ways almost at once. by we found out more about these strange people. We learnt they In Allahabad I had spent my childhood, attended my first ate red meat in enormous quantities; they had bad teeth (this school, Boys' High School, and made my first friends-some of detail was contributed by my father); they did a lot of shopping, whom I was eager to see again-so my return was more like a specially for footwear; and they put up their binoculars and came- homecoming.The city's tree-lined roads and high-ceilinged colonial ras for sale before they left. bungalows were as familiar to me as the night sky is to a stargazer. 52 Partial Recall Partial Recall 53

In a poem written while pacing up and down a studio at Yaddo on 'Horace Walpole and the English Novel: A Study of the in the summer of 1972 I discovered, quite by chance, that local Influence of The Castle of Otrunto 1764-1820'; he also fell in history and private memory are intersecting lines. love with an Erlglish girl, Phyllis Ravenscroft, and decided to marry her. In the late forties Uncle Kelly showed the first signs of At seven-thirty we are sent home multiple sclerosis, a disease thar severely disabled him for the From the Cosmopolitan Club, remaining twenty years ofhis life. During this period Aunt Phyllis My farher says, 'No bid,' ('More devoted to her husband than any Indian woman') func- My mother forgets her hand In a deck of cards. tioned as an extension of his limbs. Together with a battalion of I sit on the railing rill midnight, loyal, light-fingered, hierarchy-conscious servants, she bathed, Above a worn sign dressed, and fed Uncle Kelly, drove him to the university and That advertises a dentist. pushed his wheelchair, chasedaway the mosquitoes that settled on his arm, and turned the pages of the book he was reading. But it I go to sleep after I hear him was Aunt Phyllis alone who got ;p two or three times each night, Snore like the school bell. and, seeing that hewas tired oflying in one position, gently turned I'm standing alone in a back alley And a face I can never rccollect is removing him on the other side. The hubcaps of our dull brown Ford. Uncle Kelly and Aunt Phyllis lived in 20 Hastings Road. To The first words I mumble are the names of roads, my parents they had written saying that for the three years I would Thornhill, Hastings, Lytton . . . be going to college and university they expected me to stay with them and not in a st~de~ts'hostel, so on reaching ~llahabadit The roads are now called after Hindu nationalists or provincial was to Hastings Road thar I asked the rickshaw to take me. The leaders, but their new names are far less resonant, good only for bungalow I entered I'd often visited as a child. Built in typical aiding postmen. I cannot imagine any child reciting them. colonial style, it was set in the midst ofextensive gounds in which Atop a bookcase in my room is a photograph showing three grew neem, custard-apple, jackfruit, guava, and jujube-berry rows of solemn-faced Allahabad University students, Class of trees. In one corner was a dusty badminton court. The lawn was '28. The men are all wearing jackets, their trousers are tight and a patch of brown. All day a blind gardener, sprinkling can in narrow, and some are wearing caps; the women are in white saris, hand, moved among the flower beds. A wide verandah ran along their heads covered. I've never paid much attention to the photo- the entire front ofthe house. The bedrooms were large and airless graph, and were it not for its wooden frame, a floral design carved and lay on either side of the living room. Each dressing room had along the edges, and one slender bespectacled figure standing in a chest ofdrawers into which went everything from torn tablecloths the back row, fourth from left, I would have thrown it away and runners to used copybooks. In my earliest memory of the He is Kewal Krishna, my father's elder brother. After raking his place there was a thunderbox near the bathroom window, and degree, he went to Keble College, Oxford, and wrote a dissertation though a toilet bowl had replaced it, nothing else had changed. 54 Partial Recall Partial Recall 55

The heavy brass tap was still there in the wall, and under it stood a 40-watt electric bulb, I surveyed the enemy, books. My ill- a metal bucket and dipper. From time to time there issued from planned raids into that articulate territory never came to very the tap a thin trickle of water. Termites had eaten away the door- much, and I soon felt defeated. frames, and during the rains it was not unusual to find a snake The truth is that even before I could acquaint myselfwith the leaving the bathroom. Less disconcerting was the presence around titles of the books that surrounded me, I became impatient to the house of vagrant cows. They wandered in through the front write one. Looking out of the dressing room window at the row gate and destroyed what little garden there was. Sometimes a cow of yellow oleanders outside, their leaves wet with rain, or while was caught and tied to a tree, and an excited Aunt Phyllis would turning the virgin pages ofan economics or a geography textbook, wait for the claimant to turn up. Ifby evening none did, the animal I would dream of publishers' imprints, of a spine and title page was given a few kindly whacks and released. with my name on them. It was as though the tongue had acquired My favourite room in the house was the study. Neither of my a new taste, and so it had. One day I found it saying, parents was fond ofreading, and except for those condensed by the Reader's Digest I had not known many books in Bhilai. Afterwards, Four hundred miies away, Beyond many moons you stay. when my father became interested in Hindu religion and philosophy, commentaries on the Gita and the paperback lives of These lines, which completely took me by surprise, were ad- sundry saints, mystics, yogis, and gurus were added to the mem- dressed to the businessman's daughter in Bhilai. oirs of field marshals and the accounts of World War I1 naval There is another photograph. It is pasted on a student ID card battles. We also possessed some books on shikar, a three-volume and bears the signature of the proctor ofGovernment Intermediate set of Somerset Maugham's stories, a biography of Napoleon College, Allahabad, in one corner. I thought I'd lost the card, in- Bonaparte printed in double columns, and Gray's Anatomy. As a deed I'd forgotten all about it, when the other day it waylaid me boy, the only book I consulted was Anatomy. It always opened on again. Taken in 1963, the year I returned to Allahabad, the photo- the page containing an illustration of the female pudendum, and graph shows a smooth-chinned sixteen-year-old who is half I dipped into it whenever my parents were out of the house. man and half boy. His thick black hair is neatly parted, and he The study was where, during winters, Uncle Kelly took his is wearing a white Terylene shirt and a narrow tie. But hold the morning tea, and where he received visitors. Tall bookcases lined photograph at a distance, and you'll see the boy's confidence the walls, and someone gifted with a sensitive nose could also comes from inexperience, that behind the pleasant door-to-door catch the dry smell of foxed paper and calf bindings in which salesman's face is the face of a narcissist. Nothing seems further diligent maggots had bored tunnels. Behind thesafetyofundusted from his mind than writing poetry, and yet it is just the kind of uniform editions lay clusters of identical taw-sized gecko eggs. In thing he might do very soon. one corner was kept an easy chair, and sitting in it I felt like a The first poem was something given, something received. It general on horseback. From that coign of vantage, in the light of wrote itself. I then wrote several more. It was as though I had lifted 5 8 Partial Recall Partial Recall 5 9 the sticky lid of a tin box and the brown-winged insects breed- whether it be somebody's senile grandfather who daubed his ing inside had rushed out, their numbers such that I thought I clothes with Dettol before he put them on; or an honest classmate wouldn't see the last of them. The poems brought about a change whose ambition in life was to join the civil service; or a puffy-faced in my appearance. I was writing, but I was also being written. The university lecturer ofwhom it was said that, once a month, leaving change happened slowly and over a ~eriodof time, at the end of his wife and three small children at home, he dined by himself in which it was visible to everyone except me that whereas others Kwality's restaurant and smoked a Gold Flake cigarette afterwards. wore clothes, drab everyday shirts and trousers, I went about in We looked at them, as we did at ourselves, with unsparing eyes. costumes. Ochre cotton had replaced white Terylene. Our attitude of rebellion was shaped by our reading, just as The Royal typewriter I used was my maternal grandfather's gift much as it was reflected in the books we read. The word 'phoney' to my parents. Bought secondhand in Simla from an Englishman had entered our vocabulary through The Catcher in the Rye, and who was selling his effects prior to leaving the country, it was a when we were not trying to sp&k like Holden Caulfield, we portable model that had the weight of a saddle quern and came in recited passages from Penguin Modern Poets 5, where, for the first a high black case. When I thought I had accumulated enough time, we had come across poems that were funny, clever, sad, poems to fill a small volume, I typed them up and took the pages irreverent, and though written in a style that looked as natural and to the nearest bindery. Two days later the mournful-looking cloth- easy as breathing, left us in a state of euphoria-Gregory Corso's bound object I held in my hand was narrower than a paperback 'Marriage', Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 'Underwear', and Allen Gins- and barely possessed a spine, it had neither jacket nor publisher's berg's 'America'. imprint, and yet bore some resemblance to a book of poems. I Perhaps not so surprisingly, the ineffable longings of Rabindra- brought it home and hid it between the college textbooks on eco- nath Tagore and Kahlil Gibran-and not the profanities of the nomics and geography. Beat generation-prompted my first published work. This was a In the house adjacent to ours, similar to it architecturally but group of five poems, titled 'The Soundless Flute', in the March with a tile roof and bigger windows, lived my closest friend, Arnit 1965 issue of the Allahabad University Magazine. Rai. He and I would stand on either side of the low wall that sepa- Let not the cloud remain and dirty the sky, let it not shade the sun, let rated our compounds and talk for hours. Alongside the wall grew it not be tossed about by the wind or be pecked by the birds. Let it large, thi~kl~foliagedtrees, their trunks hidden by the underbush. merge into the bigger cloud that will carry it with its own strength, or Getting to the wall was not easy, and you had to hack your way else let it rain and die. through a tangle of branches. Once there, amidst the trees and closely planted shrubs, it was like being inside a tropical forest. I wrote about twelve such poems in all, and learnt a few things I'his forest often rang with laughter. We laughed for no reason at , about poetry I didn't know before. I came to know that you could I all, and there was nothing we didn't laugh at. We once laughed ~ say the most trivial things in it, but they would still come out at a man merely because he was bald and drove a grey car. He sounding like profound truths, or at least to my ears they did. was a phoney, which is what we felt about most people we knew, ' One humid September afternoon, some six months after the 5 8 Partial Recall Partial Recall 5 9 the sticky lid of a tin box and the brown-winged insects breed- whether it be somebody's senile grandfather who daubed his ing inside had rushed out, their numbers such that I thought I clothes with Dettol before he put them on; or an honest classmate wouldn't see the last of them. The poems brought about a change whose ambition in life was to join the civil service; or a puffy-faced in my appearance. I was writing, but I was also being written. The university lecturer ofwhom it was said that, once a month, leaving change happened slowly and over a ~eriodof time, at the end of his wife and three small children at home, he dined by himself in which it was visible to everyone except me that whereas others Kwality's restaurant and smoked a Gold Flake cigarette afterwards. wore clothes, drab everyday shirts and trousers, I went about in We looked at them, as we did at ourselves, with unsparing eyes. costumes. Ochre cotton had replaced white Terylene. Our attitude of rebellion was shaped by our reading, just as The Royal typewriter I used was my maternal grandfather's gift much as it was reflected in the books we read. The word 'phoney' to my parents. Bought secondhand in Simla from an Englishman had entered our vocabulary through The Catcher in the Rye, and who was selling his effects prior to leaving the country, it was a when we were not trying to sp&k like Holden Caulfield, we portable model that had the weight of a saddle quern and came in recited passages from Penguin Modern Poets 5, where, for the first a high black case. When I thought I had accumulated enough time, we had come across poems that were funny, clever, sad, poems to fill a small volume, I typed them up and took the pages irreverent, and though written in a style that looked as natural and to the nearest bindery. Two days later the mournful-looking cloth- easy as breathing, left us in a state of euphoria-Gregory Corso's bound object I held in my hand was narrower than a paperback 'Marriage', Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 'Underwear', and Allen Gins- and barely possessed a spine, it had neither jacket nor publisher's berg's 'America'. imprint, and yet bore some resemblance to a book of poems. I Perhaps not so surprisingly, the ineffable longings of Rabindra- brought it home and hid it between the college textbooks on eco- nath Tagore and Kahlil Gibran-and not the profanities of the nomics and geography. Beat generation-prompted my first published work. This was a In the house adjacent to ours, similar to it architecturally but group of five poems, titled 'The Soundless Flute', in the March with a tile roof and bigger windows, lived my closest friend, Arnit 1965 issue of the Allahabad University Magazine. Rai. He and I would stand on either side of the low wall that sepa- Let not the cloud remain and dirty the sky, let it not shade the sun, let rated our compounds and talk for hours. Alongside the wall grew it not be tossed about by the wind or be pecked by the birds. Let it large, thi~kl~foliagedtrees, their trunks hidden by the underbush. merge into the bigger cloud that will carry it with its own strength, or Getting to the wall was not easy, and you had to hack your way else let it rain and die. through a tangle of branches. Once there, amidst the trees and closely planted shrubs, it was like being inside a tropical forest. I wrote about twelve such poems in all, and learnt a few things I'his forest often rang with laughter. We laughed for no reason at , about poetry I didn't know before. I came to know that you could I all, and there was nothing we didn't laugh at. We once laughed ~ say the most trivial things in it, but they would still come out at a man merely because he was bald and drove a grey car. He sounding like profound truths, or at least to my ears they did. was a phoney, which is what we felt about most people we knew, ' One humid September afternoon, some six months after the 60 Partial Recall Partial Recall 6 1 poems appeared, as Amit and I were bicycling down from the uni- conventions and partly of being with the times, for poems that versity, the thought came to us to start a magazine. In an issue used capital letters looked so old-fashioned. of the Village Voice, sent by his maternal uncle, Vijay Chauhan, My handwriting kept changing. There were several styles to from New York, we had read about Fuck Youla magazine of the choose from, and I tried all of them out. I'd adopt a schoolgirl's arts. We now decided to steal the name for ourselves, modifying round hand one week, then give it up for flat angular strokes that it slightly. Amit's father, a publisher, had converted a part of the I thought suited me better, or else, in imitation of Aunt Phyllis, front verandah ofhis house into an office. In it, among the wooden add a little flourish to the letters, a flowing curve that made them tables and chairs, stood a Gestetner mimeographing machine, look like birds in flight. For the poems likewise there were models covered in dust and seldom used. We had it cleaned and learnt how (Tagore, Gibran, and a score of others), and I served my appren- to operate it. After applying ink from a large tube to the roller, we ticeship copying them, and sometimes failing to, as happened rotated the drum a few times to let the ink spread evenly. We then with X.J. Kennedy's 'Nude Desce'nding a Staircase', which I first fastened the stencil, fed the paper, and watched nervously as the read in Donald Hall's Contemporary American Poetry anthology. printed sheets rolled out. I would on occasion catch myself humming it, but the rhythmic The first number of damn youla magazine of the arts contain- modulations that made it so hummable also made it difficult to ed ten pages and had a pale green cover. It carried poems by its imitate. I had one go at the poem and did not try a second time. three editors, the third editor being Amit's brother, Alok.The back The models I followed had little in common. They belonged cover mentioned the price, which was 'Anything commensurate to different traditions, and if to the same tradition to different with your dignity-and ours', and gave the address, 18 Hastings schools. This eclecticism came with the discovery itself, for having Road, Allahabad. There was also an editorial, called 'Statement', stumbled upon the kingdom of verse I was impatient to explore in which, while putting a brave face on it, we nevertheless con- its several regions, even the most remote, and inhabit each as my fessed to the misdemeanour of writing and selling verse. native place. Though which treacherous region I was exploring in these nine lines is anybody's guess: what about? long-term policy? general objectives? that's not even funny. besides, we wouldn't know. the basic point is that all of us my breath write-more or less-and would like being read. hence dy. this state- flees downward ment is here because we thought we might explain rhingsalittle before down butterfly hill flingingpoetryatyou.who knows, perhaps it is needed. theexplanation or the flinging? dy shall be issued as frequently (or seldom) as we the red rocks feel, what is more, we'll even try and get some money off you for it. and the blue rocks the financial benefits are not meant for ourselves, poor boys' fund. it meets and kisses vietnam. (before you pigeonhole us, we didn't specify which side.) my breath Not just the editorial, but almost everything else in the magazine bleeds to pieces was printed in lower case. This was partly a matter of breaking on the white rocks below 60 Partial Recall Partial Recall 6 1 poems appeared, as Amit and I were bicycling down from the uni- conventions and partly of being with the times, for poems that versity, the thought came to us to start a magazine. In an issue used capital letters looked so old-fashioned. of the Village Voice, sent by his maternal uncle, Vijay Chauhan, My handwriting kept changing. There were several styles to from New York, we had read about Fuck Youla magazine of the choose from, and I tried all of them out. I'd adopt a schoolgirl's arts. We now decided to steal the name for ourselves, modifying round hand one week, then give it up for flat angular strokes that it slightly. Amit's father, a publisher, had converted a part of the I thought suited me better, or else, in imitation of Aunt Phyllis, front verandah ofhis house into an office. In it, among the wooden add a little flourish to the letters, a flowing curve that made them tables and chairs, stood a Gestetner mimeographing machine, look like birds in flight. For the poems likewise there were models covered in dust and seldom used. We had it cleaned and learnt how (Tagore, Gibran, and a score of others), and I served my appren- to operate it. After applying ink from a large tube to the roller, we ticeship copying them, and sometimes failing to, as happened rotated the drum a few times to let the ink spread evenly. We then with X.J. Kennedy's 'Nude Desce'nding a Staircase', which I first fastened the stencil, fed the paper, and watched nervously as the read in Donald Hall's Contemporary American Poetry anthology. printed sheets rolled out. I would on occasion catch myself humming it, but the rhythmic The first number of damn youla magazine of the arts contain- modulations that made it so hummable also made it difficult to ed ten pages and had a pale green cover. It carried poems by its imitate. I had one go at the poem and did not try a second time. three editors, the third editor being Amit's brother, Alok.The back The models I followed had little in common. They belonged cover mentioned the price, which was 'Anything commensurate to different traditions, and if to the same tradition to different with your dignity-and ours', and gave the address, 18 Hastings schools. This eclecticism came with the discovery itself, for having Road, Allahabad. There was also an editorial, called 'Statement', stumbled upon the kingdom of verse I was impatient to explore in which, while putting a brave face on it, we nevertheless con- its several regions, even the most remote, and inhabit each as my fessed to the misdemeanour of writing and selling verse. native place. Though which treacherous region I was exploring in these nine lines is anybody's guess: what about? long-term policy? general objectives? that's not even funny. besides, we wouldn't know. the basic point is that all of us my breath write-more or less-and would like being read. hence dy. this state- flees downward ment is here because we thought we might explain rhingsalittle before down butterfly hill flingingpoetryatyou.who knows, perhaps it is needed. theexplanation or the flinging? dy shall be issued as frequently (or seldom) as we the red rocks feel, what is more, we'll even try and get some money off you for it. and the blue rocks the financial benefits are not meant for ourselves, poor boys' fund. it meets and kisses vietnam. (before you pigeonhole us, we didn't specify which side.) my breath Not just the editorial, but almost everything else in the magazine bleeds to pieces was printed in lower case. This was partly a matter of breaking on the white rocks below 62 Partial Recall Partial Recall 6.3

Reading through damn youfi again, it appears that my role reminded of it. Though our age, they were already grown-up rnen, in it was to strike anguished poses and Amit's to write the poems. preparing to enter their fathers' professions or professions their Their manner is not derivative and their themes, unlike mine, fathers had chosen for them. Their future looking secure, they have less to do with the artificial wilderness beloved of artistic sometimes worried about the world's. souls and more with the time and place we lived in. He wrote Our obsession was poetry, and the world, we found, has only about young people having fun at a party, a sixth-century Buddhist one side, the funny side. For the rest, Amit and I were like other site near Allahabad, a dead paratrooper. students, conscientious and keen to do well. Admitted to the University ofAllahabad in July 1964, we were required to take is it not beautiful three subjects and pursue them for two years. Both of us offered to come billowing down in silk English (a play each by Shakespeare, Shaw, and Galsworthy, and what your little son would tell Romantic and Victorian poetryJ and ancient history, and while the ncighbour's boy if he saw you do it and he can't Amit took philosophy I had economics as the third subject. We where is your comrade who got pleasure didn't much care for history, ancient or any other, but took it all from making paper dolls the same because the subject was 'scoring', which is to say the and he who yet felt happy examiners were believed to be liberal, awarding high marks to when any said he needed a shave parachute trouble every script they read. (In contrast, those in medieval history and machine gun trouble political science were well known for being stingy.) Scoring in dead. ancient history was easier said than done, for the next thing we dead . . . can you imagine learnt was that the marks awarded depended on the length of the eyelids that won't blink when the raindrops answers rather than what was written in them. drop on them The first ten weeks of classes did little to kindle our interest in the ancient world. We realized that what the lecturers were telling We couldn't have brought out more than a hundred copies of us we could find out on our own in half the time. Moreover, who the first issue. I took one to Uncle Kelly. who, when he saw what could have wanted to hear about the Hittites, say, when there was the magazine was called, raised his eyebrows, a wrinkle of disap- a roomful of lovely provincial girls with freshly talcumed faces to proval forming on his forehead. Then he looked up, and his face look at? They would troop into the classroom, sit in the area re- broke into the thinnest ofsmiles. One or two English Department served for them, listen to the lecture, and troop out without our lecturers we knew bought copies and said 'Damn you' as they getting a clue to where they came from and where they went. paid for it, but most of our friends just stared at us in disbelief Finally, I made eye contact with one of the girls, a plain-looking and walked away. Writing poetry belonged to the phase of their heavenly creature with thick black eyebrows and a low forehead. lives they had sidestepped altogether, and they had no wish to be Having repeated the contact over many days, and having noticed 62 Partial Recall Partial Recall 6.3

that her eyes lingered over me just as mine did over her, I lucked royal blue ink, usually in both, and whose margins had 'Imp' up courage and asked her for a book. It was the beginning of a scribbled in them. Since one person, however fast he copied, could romance. I started going over to her place, and as the months not copy everything, Amit and I had decided to divide the work. the visits became more frequent. She lived with her old He took responsibility for half the syllabus and I for the remain- parents in a large two-storey house that had countless small ing half. rooms, and as soon as she and I were inside one of them we be- I spent the autumn vacation in October with my parents, haved as if her parents were not just old but also deaf, blind, and taking the 3 Up Howrah-Bombay Mail out of Allahabad and crippled. Amit would be kept informed of these developments. At reaching Bhilai twenty-eight hours later, after two changes. The home, after returning from the university, he and I would kick a Royal typewriter now went everywhere with me, and I was carry- ball around or play a game of badminton, and when it grew dark ing it when I got down from the train. Though not intending to stand near the boundary wall and talk into the evening, till one of write any poems, I still wanted ts have the machine around, just Aunt Phyllis's servants came and said dinner was on the table or in case. In Bhilai I received two letters from Amit. 'Vinoo dear (I we heard the ayah call out to Amit. Reluctantly, we would leave don't mean it)', the first letter began (Vinoo is my nickname), 'By the strip of forest that lay on either side of the wall and go into God! What notes! What notes? Egypt. Great. Burns, Breasted, our lighted bungalows. Swain, Finger. And this bloody Egypt is worth at least two other Though the BA Part I exams were not until the following sum- civilizations, so please add one more civ to your list. Well, I'm not mer, we had begun studying for them in all seriousness. Perhaps working too hard . . . I play 3 solid hours of squash every day.' studying is the wrong word to describe what we did, for most of Immediately after this he writes, 'In ancient India I have complet- our time went in making 'notes'. This was true about history ed religious movements of Gth century BC. Will proceed further. particularly. The history syllabus covered both ancient India and What about you? Going solider than ever?' the ancient world, and while books on ancient India were available In all his letters to me Amit would have something to say about in every shop and kiosk, and under every tree in University Road, Peeks, as Piyush Kanta Verma was called. The three of us had those on the ancient world were hard to come by. Our familiar- known each other from the time we were in Boys' High School, ity with them did not go beyond knowing their authors' names, where Peeks and I, aged nine and eight respectively, had fought which, presumably, were British or American, and their resounding for the hand of an elf-like seven-year-old Anglo-Indian girl, June titles, such as The Conquest of Civilization. The handful of teach- Cearns. The son of a high court judge, I never saw him speak to ers and students who possessed copies scarcely wanted to lend his father without first rising to attention, and Amit and I were them out, and if they did it was only for a few days. So making convinced that he also sirred him. He later went into the civil notes in fact meant copying at high speed whole chapters in service, to nobody's surprise. Peeks wasn't interested in literature longhand, the drudgery made worse by the condition of the and didn't write poetry. Nevertheless, he saw nothing wrong with books, whose every page was heavily underlined in red pencil or those who did. Like us, he had spent the vacation transcribing 66 Partial Recall Partial Recall 67 books. 'Peeks isgoingverysolid', Amit wrote, and signed the letter distance. We took salt tablets with breakfast to prevent sunstroke. '~~lkRaj Anand (author of Crozus and Pigeorzs).' It was the middle of summer and examination time. After four days, on 13 October, he wrote to me again. 'You don't The changing season saw us change too. Ifwe still mec near the really expect me to believe,' he said, referring to my economics boundary wall, it was to assess how well we were prepared for course, 'that you have done only Indian population, do you? I the exams, the thought ofwhich made us rush back to our desks. have completed Egypt today. I move over to prehistory. Brother We slept less, and at odd hours, and when awake had our eyes Peeks is going super-super-solid . . . By the way, I am glad you glued to books, continuing to read even at the dining table, have given up heavy prose. Your poem is horrible-what about the during meals. Quite apart from the hundreds of pages that had other one?' Of the poem I have no recollection. Was it about to be crammed, we had dates in history and quotations in Eng- adolescence in the unrestrained voice of adolescence? Or a piece lish (Graham Hough and Maurice Bowra on the Romantics, A.C. of shamming, a pseudo-poem, a laboured imitation of an ad- Ward on Shaw) to commit to fiemory. And on top of this I had mired work? Or something composed in a frenzy, supernaturally economics to cope with, a subject I felt remote from and which inspired, as though dictated from above? But whatever it was, his it had been a mistake to offer. We studied selectively of course, letter when it came that day thirty years ago must have made me like everyone else. There were parts of the syllabus we left out quite miserable. and others we mugged up, depending on the 'guess papers' in Suddenly the neem trees looked very bare. Their scythe-shaped each subject. To make a guess paper we scrutinized the previous leaves fell in ones and twos, then in great masses, the wind scat- ten years' questions, available in inexpensive booklets with flimsy tering them all over the compound. The sweeperwoman with her pink or yellow covers on University Road, and after taking into twig-broom would go about collecting the leaves into small heaps, account the hints dropped by teachers and the gossip among which she would burn. New shoots appeared overnight on the students, and after listening to our own inner voices, we drew up branches. The heat continued to get worse. We opened the sky- a list of questions that were likely to be asked. lighrs, but they only let in more hot air. The ceiling fans, even at Peeks went a step further and enlisted divine help. He arrived top speed, rotated slowly. Whiskey, Aunt Phyllis's ancient Pomeran- on the morning of the first exam wearing a tilak on his forehead, ian bitch, repaired into a bathroom for most of the day. By the and it looked as though he had come straight from a temple. second week ofApril the beds were out and we were sleeping in the Conveniently, the temple was located inside his house. It was like lawn, under mosquito nets. Dew had fallen and inside the nets any other room in it, but furnished with the pictures of gods and the white sheets were cool. Lines of camels passed, headed for goddesses instead of almirahs and beds, and the tilak was ap- the river, where they were loaded with watermelons. A pleasant plied by his mother. It only took a minute, Peeks said, and could breeze would blow, though not for long. The nights were getting do no harm. shorter and with sunrise, when the same camels made the return I was in Bhilai when the results were declared. There was a brief journey, the heat started building up again. By nine the roads telegram from Uncle Kelly followed by a letter from Amit, giving would be deserted and whoever ventured out saw mirages in the details. The letter is undated, but was written in the first week of 66 Partial Recall Partial Recall 67 books. 'Peeks isgoingverysolid', Amit wrote, and signed the letter distance. We took salt tablets with breakfast to prevent sunstroke. '~~lkRaj Anand (author of Crozus and Pigeorzs).' It was the middle of summer and examination time. After four days, on 13 October, he wrote to me again. 'You don't The changing season saw us change too. Ifwe still mec near the really expect me to believe,' he said, referring to my economics boundary wall, it was to assess how well we were prepared for course, 'that you have done only Indian population, do you? I the exams, the thought ofwhich made us rush back to our desks. have completed Egypt today. I move over to prehistory. Brother We slept less, and at odd hours, and when awake had our eyes Peeks is going super-super-solid . . . By the way, I am glad you glued to books, continuing to read even at the dining table, have given up heavy prose. Your poem is horrible-what about the during meals. Quite apart from the hundreds of pages that had other one?' Of the poem I have no recollection. Was it about to be crammed, we had dates in history and quotations in Eng- adolescence in the unrestrained voice of adolescence? Or a piece lish (Graham Hough and Maurice Bowra on the Romantics, A.C. of shamming, a pseudo-poem, a laboured imitation of an ad- Ward on Shaw) to commit to fiemory. And on top of this I had mired work? Or something composed in a frenzy, supernaturally economics to cope with, a subject I felt remote from and which inspired, as though dictated from above? But whatever it was, his it had been a mistake to offer. We studied selectively of course, letter when it came that day thirty years ago must have made me like everyone else. There were parts of the syllabus we left out quite miserable. and others we mugged up, depending on the 'guess papers' in Suddenly the neem trees looked very bare. Their scythe-shaped each subject. To make a guess paper we scrutinized the previous leaves fell in ones and twos, then in great masses, the wind scat- ten years' questions, available in inexpensive booklets with flimsy tering them all over the compound. The sweeperwoman with her pink or yellow covers on University Road, and after taking into twig-broom would go about collecting the leaves into small heaps, account the hints dropped by teachers and the gossip among which she would burn. New shoots appeared overnight on the students, and after listening to our own inner voices, we drew up branches. The heat continued to get worse. We opened the sky- a list of questions that were likely to be asked. lighrs, but they only let in more hot air. The ceiling fans, even at Peeks went a step further and enlisted divine help. He arrived top speed, rotated slowly. Whiskey, Aunt Phyllis's ancient Pomeran- on the morning of the first exam wearing a tilak on his forehead, ian bitch, repaired into a bathroom for most of the day. By the and it looked as though he had come straight from a temple. second week ofApril the beds were out and we were sleeping in the Conveniently, the temple was located inside his house. It was like lawn, under mosquito nets. Dew had fallen and inside the nets any other room in it, but furnished with the pictures of gods and the white sheets were cool. Lines of camels passed, headed for goddesses instead of almirahs and beds, and the tilak was ap- the river, where they were loaded with watermelons. A pleasant plied by his mother. It only took a minute, Peeks said, and could breeze would blow, though not for long. The nights were getting do no harm. shorter and with sunrise, when the same camels made the return I was in Bhilai when the results were declared. There was a brief journey, the heat started building up again. By nine the roads telegram from Uncle Kelly followed by a letter from Amit, giving would be deserted and whoever ventured out saw mirages in the details. The letter is undated, but was written in the first week of 68 Partial Recall Partial Recall 69

July 1965. 'And what a huge fake it is', he wrote, 'that ancient eggs to India') from Penguin Modern Poets 5. According to the history is more scoring than medieval history. We both did our date below my signature in the title page, I had bought the book papers very well, and yet you just get 100 [out of a maximum of in August 1965. That September we had brought out the first 150 marks] and I 96. Peeks [who had medieval history] mucks up issue of damn you. one question solid and generally has poorer preparation, and slogs Even we realized that the magazine, if it was to continue, would 1 12!' The letter contains one more surprise, the marks of the girl need contributions from poets other than its editors. Our diffi- with the thick black eyebrows and a low forehead. She got 122. culty was that sitting in Hastings Road, Allahabad, we didn't know Since that day I have mistrusted examination results and had a where to look for them. The English poets we were familiar with little more faith in the influencing power of framed oleographs. were the sort who have their monuments in Westminster Abbey, In English and philosophy also, Amit's marks were less than and it did not occur to us that we could ask Indian poets to con- what he expected. In the letter he sounded lonely and despondent, tribute. This left the United States, a country just fifty yards down which was unusual for him, and asked me to return to Allaha- the road, at whose entrance stood not the famous statue but a bad sooner than I would have normally. 'Vinoo, even though the bright red letter box nailed to a neem tree. Into it Amit dropped university opens late can't you come back early? I miss you a lot. an aerogramme addressed to Vijay Chauhan in New York. Even Peeks is not here.' Greatly disappointed though we were Vijay, or Chhote Bhaiya (Younger Brother) as every-body call- with the results, we were too young, too alive, too disdaining of ed him, was at the time studying international relations at Colum- authority to let them affect us for long. At the same time, even if bia University on a Fulbright. He was a short compact-looking unknown to ourselves, we were trusting and innocent, still very man, with large bulging eyes, a carefully trimmed beard, and a much the boys who stand first in class and on Annual Day walk receding hairline. He wore blue jeans andT-shirts, smoked Char- away with all the prizes. When the university reopened we resum- minar cigarettes, and liked his rum, which he poured out ofasilver ed copying chapters out of textbooks. As resolutely as on ancient hip flask. He was a bachelor. At Sagar University where he taught Egypt earlier, we now started making notes on Greece and Rome. ~oliticalscience and directed contemporary American plays for We were in BA Part 11. an amateur group, he was seen by some as an oddball, whereas The two lives we led, of ambitious terrestrial students and to others, his students mostly, he was a hero figure. He was cer- rebellious subterranean poets, continued to run side by side and tainly one to us. Amit's letter to him, written on 30 October, reads, on the whole peacefully, one part of us concentrating on the cam- in part: paigns of Alexander the Great, the Punic Wars, the rise of the We are now getting down to the second issue of dy and are trying Guptas, the significance of the opening scene in Macbeth, and to increase its scope. You once said that there were some magazines in the other reading the Village Voice and declaiming 'Underwear' theVillagewhosecontributors would have no objection to contributing ('Women's underwear holds things up1 Men's underwear holds to LIS also. Rut that is not the point ofthis letter. You also said you had things down') and 'America' ('America when will you send your the addresses of these magazines. Rut even that, ifyou ask me, is nor 68 Partial Recall Partial Recall 69

the point of this letter. Ifyou can, will you please send us the addresses PEEKS! My muse is awake. First the first verse- of these people. remember Early in November, just days after he posted the letter, Amit fell in november ill. He came out of the philosophy class complaining ofpain in his and then the singularly rhyming one arms and went home. The pain persisted and a blood test was done, after which the doctor treating him suggested he be taken Amit Rai to Bombay where better diagnostic facilities were available. In a is going to die . . . stream of letters he wrote from there, Amit sent us an almost day I'll cry . . . by day account of his illness. 'My disease is to be finally diagnosed I'll try . . . on Tuesday,' he wrote to Peeks and myself on 17 November in one 0 BROTHER! I'm still a poet after all.. of his first letters. 'They took the live marrow from my bones to There had in those seven months been a brief period of about test and boy! did it pain. AmmiIMamma [his parents] are worried, eight weeks, from the end of February to the end of April, when but curiously it did not matter to me much whether I had cancer Amit returned to Allahabad. Looking at him, one could hardly say or no. I am somewhat having the Kay Kendall feeling, the anything was wrong. We laughed and talked as before, and he difference being that I know everything.' Seven months later, joked about all the phoney sympathetic letters he had received in on 2 1 June 1966, in Bombay's Tata Memorial Hospital, three Bombay. He stayed away from the university for the same reason, weeks after his eighteenth birthday, Amit died of leukaemia. His to avoid meeting people who would ask about his health. Some of last letter, to Peeks, was written on 9 June. them, since I was a friend of his, would come and ask me, and I would shrug them off, believing Amit had been cured. One way Dear Piyush, I have not written for so long because I was in no physical con- of shutting up these solicitous people, we thought, would be to dition to write. I have recently been subject to very severe pains and bring out the second issue of damn you. have lived my last few days under morphia. I don't write this to get It appeared that March, without the Greenwich Village poets sympathy- but to make a thoroughly silly sentimental confession. You but in a new A4 format. On the cover it said 'poems & sketches', remember in November (note the rhyme) I said cancer does not make and inside were contributions by the editors and their relatives any difference to me. Believe me I was sincere, but now 1beg to with- and friends. There was a story, 'Lucky Horace', by Amit's cousin draw the statement. Vinoo was here today and said quote grotesque Sara, aged ten; an oil company slogan, 'I'll put a tiger in your rumours weregoing throughAllahabad unquote. Itwas his unominous way ofsaying that people in Allahabad were already convinced that I tank', became the first line of a pastiche by Vijay Chauhan; and was dead. Well I am not deadas yet andstill I am not so frightfullykeen there were haiku-like verses and imitations of T.S. Eliot by the to survive. No emotions involved, what I want is a decision one less philistine of our university friends. Amit had a poem on a way or the other. 'One way' would be preferable, but 'the other' too family picnic ('my brother alone half-heartedly sings / yippi yippi is fine by me. yai'), and I contributed a reflection in poetic prose on the human 70 Partial Recall Partial Recall

condition. I had no sorrows to speak of, yet always wrote as Program. Not many passengers had got down at Cedar Rapids, so though I had been stabbed through the heart. It played havoc with it wasn't difficult for him to identi@ us, two tired foreigners who my grammar. Among the sketches one showed a nude woman were looking a bit lost. We put our bags in his station wagon and lying inside a bubble, and the acknowledgement below it said sped off towards Iowa City. Night having fallen, we saw little ofthe 'Courtesy: Bugger.' It was meant to shock. The price of damn landscape. I did not know that, even had it been daylight, there you/2 was one rupee. would still be little to see. Elliott brought us to an apartment There were to be four more issues of the magazine before it building called Mayflower, and said he'd be back after an hour to ceased publication in 1968. The sixth issue listed in the back some take us out for dinner. We went to a Chinese restaurant just out- of the little magazines and small presses that exchanged with us, side Iowa City, in Coralville, and were joined there by the emigre BB Books, Trace, University of Tampa Poetry Review, Wormwood Czech novelist Arnost Lustig and his wife Vera. The food was Review, Elizabeth, dust books, Manhattan Review, open skull, El unfamiliar, but more than this, Caralville seemed to be an unreal Corno Emplumado, Hyphid, Iconlatre, Openings Press, Hors sort of place. Too many red and green neon signs, too few people, Commerce Press, Camel? Coming, Beloit PoetryJournal, Loveletter, almost no noise, and no permanent residents or buildings. South Florida Poetryjournal, Outcast, Klactoveedsedsteen, Broadside Next morning, my first morning in America, as I emerged from Press, Smyrna Press, Poetry Australia, Poetry XIChange, Tornado. a bank at the corner of North Dubuque and Washington, I heard For years afterwards, university libraries abroad would write someone call out 'Vee-noo'. I froze on the sidewalk, and the same asking for back issues of damn you for their special collections, instant plunged down a shaft of time, passing certain gateposts, but our calf-time was behind us and their letters remained un- bungalows, armchairs, verandahs, treetops, as I fell. Then I saw answered. Arnost. He was standing some twenty yards away, outside a drugstore, chuckling to himself. I remembered his asking me at dinner the previous evening if my friends in Allahabad addressed me by another name. By calling that name out now, he had The Ozark Airlines plane that took my wife and me from Chicago onlywished to make me feel at home. As I walked towards Arnost, to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was no bigger than a Greyhound bus and Washington Street merged into Hastings Road, and there was a less comfortable. The flight was short, but that is not the only neem tree near where he stood. I wondered then if some of us can reason why for the first time in forty-eight hours I breathed a ever leave the places we've grown up in. little more easily. At leastplanes like these don't crash, I remember telling myself, and indeed the aircraft seemed to cover the distance without leaving the ground. Coming inside the airport lounge, we were met by Elliott Anderson from the University of Iowa's International Writing Death ofa Poet 7 5 Bernini and Michelangelo, and I spent long hours spellbound by their art. But at the same time I must make a confession. The European girls Death of a Poet disappointed me. They have beautiful faces, great figures, and they showed it all. But there was nothing to see. I looked blankly at their smooth, creaseless, and apparently scratch-resistant crotches, sighed, and moved on to the next picture. Arun Kolatkar, who is widely regarded as one of the great Indian The boys, too. They let it all hang out, but were hardly what you might call well-hung. David, for example. Was it David? Great poets of the last century, was born in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, in muscles, great body, but his penis was like a tiny little mouse. Move 1931. His father was an educationist, and after a stint as the prin- on. Next picture. cipal ofa local school he taught at a teacher's training college in the . same city. 'He liked nothing better in life than to meet a truly After matriculating in 1947, Kolatkar attended art school in unteachable object', Kolatkar once said about him. In an unpub- Kolhapur, and, in 1949, joined the Sir J.J. School ofArt in Bom- lished autobiographical essay which he read at the Festival of bay (now Mumbai). He abandoned it two years later, mid-way India in Stockholm in 1987, Kolatkar describes the house in through the course, but went back in 1957, when he completed Kolhapur where he spent his first eighteen years: the assignments and, finally, took the diploma in painting. The same year he joined Ajanta Advertising as visualizer, and quickly I grew up in a house with nine rooms that were arranged, well almost, established himself in the profession which, in 1989, inducted like a house of cards. Five in a row on the ground, topped by three on him into the hall of fame for lifetime achievement. the first, and one on the second floor. The place wasn't quite as cheerful as playing cards, though. Or Kolatkar also led another life, and took great care to keep the as colourful. All the rooms had mudfloors which had to be plastered two lives separate. His poet friends were scarcely aware of the with cowdung every week to keep them in good repair. All the walls advertising legend in their midst, for he never spoke to them about were painted, or rather distempered, in some indeterminate colour his prize-winning ad campaigns or the agencies he did them for. which I can only describe as a lighter shade of sulphurous yellow. His first poems started appearing in English and Marathi magazines in the early 1950s and he continued to write in both languages for It was in one ofthese rooms-his father's study on the first floor- the next fifty years, creatingtwo independent and equally significant that Kolatkar found 'a hidden treasure'. It consisted of bodies ofwork. Occasionally he made jottings, in which he wond- three or four packets ofglossy blackand white picture postcards show- ered about the strange bilingual creature he was: ing the monuments and architectural marvels of Greece, as well as sculptures from the various museums of Italy and France. I have a pen in my possession As I sat in my father's chair, examining the contents of his drawers, which writes in 2 languages it was inevitable that I should've been introduced to the finest ach- and draws in one ievements of Baroque atid Renaissance art, the works of people like Death ofa Poet 7 5 Bernini and Michelangelo, and I spent long hours spellbound by their art. But at the same time I must make a confession. The European girls Death of a Poet disappointed me. They have beautiful faces, great figures, and they showed it all. But there was nothing to see. I looked blankly at their smooth, creaseless, and apparently scratch-resistant crotches, sighed, and moved on to the next picture. Arun Kolatkar, who is widely regarded as one of the great Indian The boys, too. They let it all hang out, but were hardly what you might call well-hung. David, for example. Was it David? Great poets of the last century, was born in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, in muscles, great body, but his penis was like a tiny little mouse. Move 1931. His father was an educationist, and after a stint as the prin- on. Next picture. cipal ofa local school he taught at a teacher's training college in the . same city. 'He liked nothing better in life than to meet a truly After matriculating in 1947, Kolatkar attended art school in unteachable object', Kolatkar once said about him. In an unpub- Kolhapur, and, in 1949, joined the Sir J.J. School ofArt in Bom- lished autobiographical essay which he read at the Festival of bay (now Mumbai). He abandoned it two years later, mid-way India in Stockholm in 1987, Kolatkar describes the house in through the course, but went back in 1957, when he completed Kolhapur where he spent his first eighteen years: the assignments and, finally, took the diploma in painting. The same year he joined Ajanta Advertising as visualizer, and quickly I grew up in a house with nine rooms that were arranged, well almost, established himself in the profession which, in 1989, inducted like a house of cards. Five in a row on the ground, topped by three on him into the hall of fame for lifetime achievement. the first, and one on the second floor. The place wasn't quite as cheerful as playing cards, though. Or Kolatkar also led another life, and took great care to keep the as colourful. All the rooms had mudfloors which had to be plastered two lives separate. His poet friends were scarcely aware of the with cowdung every week to keep them in good repair. All the walls advertising legend in their midst, for he never spoke to them about were painted, or rather distempered, in some indeterminate colour his prize-winning ad campaigns or the agencies he did them for. which I can only describe as a lighter shade of sulphurous yellow. His first poems started appearing in English and Marathi magazines in the early 1950s and he continued to write in both languages for It was in one ofthese rooms-his father's study on the first floor- the next fifty years, creatingtwo independent and equally significant that Kolatkar found 'a hidden treasure'. It consisted of bodies ofwork. Occasionally he made jottings, in which he wond- three or four packets ofglossy blackand white picture postcards show- ered about the strange bilingual creature he was: ing the monuments and architectural marvels of Greece, as well as sculptures from the various museums of Italy and France. I have a pen in my possession As I sat in my father's chair, examining the contents of his drawers, which writes in 2 languages it was inevitable that I should've been introduced to the finest ach- and draws in one ievements of Baroque atid Renaissance art, the works of people like 76 Partial Recall Death of a Poet

My pencil is sharpened at both ends It isn't another temple, I use one end to write in Marathi he said, rhe orher in English it's just a cowshed. ('Manohar')

what I wrire with one end After the success of jejuri, except for the odd poem in a comes our as English magazine, Kolatkar did not publish anything. To friends who what I write with the other visited him, he would sometimes read from whatever he was comes our as Mararhi working on at the time, but there were to be no further volumes. Then in July 2004 he brought out Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa His first book in English,jejuri, a sequence ofthirty-one poems Satra. At a function held at the yational Centre for the Perform- based on a visit to a temple town of the same name near Pune, ing Arts' Little Theatre in Bombay, five poets read from the two appeared in 1976 to instant acclaim, winning the Commonwealth books. Kolatkar, wearing a black T-shirt and brown corduroy Poetry Prize and establishing his international reputation. The trousers, sat in the audience. He was by then terminally ill with main attraction of Jejuri is the Khandoba temple, a folk god stomach cancer and did not have long to live. popular with the nomadic and pastoral communities of Maha- To his readers it must have seemed at the time, as it did to me, rashtra and north Karnataka. Though Kolatkar is an unbeliever that the publication of these long awaited new books by Kolatkar, and does not hide it, the tone, bemused, seemingly offhand, is far twenty-eight years after he published jejuri, completed his Eng- from mocking. On the contrary, he is divinely rapt by everything lish oeuvre. There were some scattered uncollected poems of he sees, as much by the faith of the pilgrims who come to worship course, most notably the long poem 'the boatride', but they had at Jejuri's shrines as by the shrines themselves, one of which hap- appeared in magazines ('the boatride' in the last issue of damn pens to be not a shrine at all: you) and anthologies before and in any case were not enough to make another full-length collection. Which is why when Ashok The door was open. Manohar thought Shahane, Kolatkar's publisher, first brought up the idea of The Ir was one more temple. Boatride andother Poems and asked me to draw up a list of things to include in it I was sceptical. In the event, the list, based on what He looked inside. was available on my shelves, did not look as meagre as I had feared. Wondering It had thirty-two poems divided into three sections: 'Poems in which god he was going to find. English', which had poems written originally in English; 'Poems He quickly turned away in Marathi', which had poems written originally in Marathi but when a wide eyed calf which he translated into English; and 'Translations', which had looked back ar him. translations of Marathi bhakti poets, mostly of Tukaram. 76 Partial Recall Death of a Poet

My pencil is sharpened at both ends It isn't another temple, I use one end to write in Marathi he said, rhe orher in English it's just a cowshed. ('Manohar')

The first poem in the first section was 'The Renunciation of the widely distributed throughout India, for which he felt 'daisies' was Dog', written in 1953. A poem titled 'A Prostitute on a Pilgrim- not the right equivalent. Here is the poem: age to Pandharpur Visits the Photographer's Tent During the Annual Ashadhi Fair', from his Marathi book Chirimiri, was from Bombay made me a beggar. Kalyan gave me a lump of jaggery to suck. the1980s. The Boatride and Other Poems, I remember thinking In a small village that had a waterfall to myself, though small in terms of the number of pages, would but no name be the only book to represent all the decades of Kolatkar's writing my blanket found a buyer life barring the last and the only one to have, between the same and I feasted on just plain ordinary water. covers, his English and Marathi poems. Kolatkar approved of the selection when we discussed it over the phone and made one sug- I arrived in Nasik with gestion, which was to put 'the boatride' not with the 'Poems in peepul leaves between my teeth. English', as I had done, but at the end of the book, in a section of There I sold my Tukaram to buy myself some bread and mince. its own. The reason for this, though he did not say it in so many When I turned off Agra Road, words, was that in its overall structure, which is that of a trip or one of my sandals gave up the ghost. journey described from the moment ofsetting out to the moment of return, and in its observer's tone, 'the boatride', though written I gave myself a good bath ten years earlier, prefigures jejuri, his next sequence. in a little stream. A week or two after this conversation when next I spoke with I knocked on the first door I came upon, Kolatkar he surprised me by saying that I should edit TheBoatride. asked for a handout, and left the village. I sat down under a tree, Since the book's contents had already been decided and there were hungry no more but thirsty like never before. no further poems to add, or at least none that I was aware of, my role at the time, as editor, seemed limited to ensuring that we I gave my name et cetera had a good copy-text. But even this, I realized, would not be easy. to a man in a bullock cart There was one poem, 'TheTurnaround', about which Kolatkar who hated beggars and quoted Tukaram, had in the past expressed reservation, and I wondered if I should but who, when we got to his farm later, was kind enough to give me use it as it stood. In 1989, when Daniel Weissbort and I were a cool drink of water. editing Periplus: Poetry in Translation (1993), I had asked Kolat- kar for unpublished translations of his Marathi poems. He had Then came Rotegaon shown me 'The Turnaround' on that occasion, but, unhappy where I went on trial about one word in it, 'daisies', had asked me not to include it in and had to drag the carcass away Periplus. The Marathi had vishnukranta, a common wild flower when howling all night 78 Partial Recall Death of a Poet 79

a dog died in the temple My tinshod hegira where I was trying to get some sleep. was hotting up.

There I got bread to eat all right The station two miles ahead of me, but a woman was pissing. the town three miles behind, I didn't see her in the dark I stopped to straighten my dhoti and she just blew up. that had bunched up in my crotch Bread you want you motherfucker you blind cunt, she said, when sweat stung my eyes 1'11 give you bread. and I could see.

a dog died in the temple My tinshod hegira where I was trying to get some sleep. was hotting up.

A low fence by the roadside. I could smell molasses boiling in a field. A clean swept yard. I asked for some sugarcane to eat. A hut. An old man. I shat on daisies A young woman in a doorway. and wiped my arse with neem leaves. I asked for some water I found a beedi lying on the road and cupped my hands to receive it. and put it in my pocket. Water dripping down my elbows It was walk walk walk and walk all the way. I looked at the old man. It was a year of famine. The goodly beard. I saw a dead bullock. The contentment that showed in his eyes. I crossed a hill. The cut up can of kerosene I picked up a small coin that lay prostrate before him. from a temple on top of that hill. Bread arrived, unbidden, Kopargaon is a big town. with an onion for a companion. That's where I read that Stalin was dead. I ate it up. Kopargaon is a big town I up the haversack I was sitting on. where it seemed shameful to beg. I thought about it for a mile or two. And I had to knock on five doors But I knew already to get half a handful of rice. that it was time to turn around. Dust in my beard, dust in my hair. The sun like a hammer on the head. Apart from the problem of the copy-text, there were, in 'The An itching arse. Turnaround', passages I found mystifying. The poem is about a A night spent on flagstones. walking trip through western Maharashtra and Kolatkar gives the 82 Partial Recn ll Death of n Poet 8 3 names of the towns he passes through: Kalyan, Nasik, Rotegaon, in 2002. When his condition deteriorated, his family shifted him Kopargaon. Far from being a pleasant excursion-though it has to Pune, to the house ofhis younger brother, who was a doctor. He its light moments--the trip turns out to be an ordeal. At Rote- had already been in Pune ten days when I made the phone call gaon, he says, he 'went on trial', but there is no mention in the and found rhat he was too weak to speak. When I persisted, a little poem of any crime or whether the 'dog [that] died in the temple/ excitedly I'm afraid, in asking him about 'The Turnaround', he where [he] was trying to get some sleep' and the crime are con- said it was 'an inner journey' and mumbled something about a nected. By the time he reached Kopargaon, it had become phy- 'personal crisis'. He said he'd explain everything if I came to Pune. sically unendurable for him to continue walking: 'My tinshod I took the next train. hegira/ was hotting up'. But what did 'tinshod hegira' mean? In I reached Pune late in the evening of the 2 1" and made my way fact, now that I was reading it with an editorial eye, I felt there was to his brother's house in Bibwewadi. The house was in a side street, an air of mystery hanging over not just certain passages but the a duplex in a row of identical housds, each with a modest front yard whole poem. '[Iln realism you are down to facts on which the including a motor scooter or car, often both, parked in it. Kolat- world is based: that sudden reality which smashes romanticism kar was in an upstairs room and seemed to be asleep. The brother into a pulp', Joyce told Arthur Power. As a poet of 'that sudden who was a doctor was still at his clinic, but his two other brothers, reality', as someone who revelled in the particular and was passio- Sudhir and Makarand, were there, as was his wife Soonoo. 'His nate about nouns, especially proper nouns, Kolatkar gives us all mouth is constantly parched', Sudhir said, 'and that's affected the facts about the trip including the year ('Kopargoan is a big his speech. He also cannot take in any food. But he feels a little town./ That's where I read that Stalin was dead.'), but this only better in the mornings. Maybe you should come back tomorrow deepened the puzzle. The poem's dramatic opening line, 'Bombay and put your questions to him.' Looking at Kolatkar, there wasn't made me a beggar', leaves several questions unanswered. What much hope of getting answers. had made him leave the city and seek the open road? Did he have When I returned in the morning, I found Kolatkar was awake a destination in mind, or even an itinerary? Was he, as his route and, judging by the faces of those around him, ready to receive suggests, going to the pilgrimage town of Shirdi, which is just visitors. I pulled up a chair close to his bed and we resumed the fourteen kilometres from Kopargaon? In 1953, the year Stalin phone conversation started three days ago. Speaking haltingly and died, Kolatkar was 22 years old. with difficulty, sometimes leaving his sentences unfinished, he My last phone conversation with Kolatkar was early in the said that 'The Renunciation of the Dog' and 'The Turnaround' third week of September. By then he had stopped going to Cafk had come out of the same experience. Though it seems from 'The Military, an Irani restaurant in Meadows Street, where over cups Turnaround' that he went on the walking trip alone, Kolatkar said of tea he routinely met with a close circle of friends on Thursday rhat a friend, the poet and painter Bandu Waze, had accompanied afternoons, as he had earlier met them, for more than three de- him. There is a reference to Waze, though not by name, in 'The cades, at Wayside Inn in Kala Ghoda, before the place shut down Renunciation of the Dog': 82 Partial Recn ll Death of n Poet 8 3 names of the towns he passes through: Kalyan, Nasik, Rotegaon, in 2002. When his condition deteriorated, his family shifted him Kopargaon. Far from being a pleasant excursion-though it has to Pune, to the house ofhis younger brother, who was a doctor. He its light moments--the trip turns out to be an ordeal. At Rote- had already been in Pune ten days when I made the phone call gaon, he says, he 'went on trial', but there is no mention in the and found rhat he was too weak to speak. When I persisted, a little poem of any crime or whether the 'dog [that] died in the temple/ excitedly I'm afraid, in asking him about 'The Turnaround', he where [he] was trying to get some sleep' and the crime are con- said it was 'an inner journey' and mumbled something about a nected. By the time he reached Kopargaon, it had become phy- 'personal crisis'. He said he'd explain everything if I came to Pune. sically unendurable for him to continue walking: 'My tinshod I took the next train. hegira/ was hotting up'. But what did 'tinshod hegira' mean? In I reached Pune late in the evening of the 2 1" and made my way fact, now that I was reading it with an editorial eye, I felt there was to his brother's house in Bibwewadi. The house was in a side street, an air of mystery hanging over not just certain passages but the a duplex in a row of identical housds, each with a modest front yard whole poem. '[Iln realism you are down to facts on which the including a motor scooter or car, often both, parked in it. Kolat- world is based: that sudden reality which smashes romanticism kar was in an upstairs room and seemed to be asleep. The brother into a pulp', Joyce told Arthur Power. As a poet of 'that sudden who was a doctor was still at his clinic, but his two other brothers, reality', as someone who revelled in the particular and was passio- Sudhir and Makarand, were there, as was his wife Soonoo. 'His nate about nouns, especially proper nouns, Kolatkar gives us all mouth is constantly parched', Sudhir said, 'and that's affected the facts about the trip including the year ('Kopargoan is a big his speech. He also cannot take in any food. But he feels a little town./ That's where I read that Stalin was dead.'), but this only better in the mornings. Maybe you should come back tomorrow deepened the puzzle. The poem's dramatic opening line, 'Bombay and put your questions to him.' Looking at Kolatkar, there wasn't made me a beggar', leaves several questions unanswered. What much hope of getting answers. had made him leave the city and seek the open road? Did he have When I returned in the morning, I found Kolatkar was awake a destination in mind, or even an itinerary? Was he, as his route and, judging by the faces of those around him, ready to receive suggests, going to the pilgrimage town of Shirdi, which is just visitors. I pulled up a chair close to his bed and we resumed the fourteen kilometres from Kopargaon? In 1953, the year Stalin phone conversation started three days ago. Speaking haltingly and died, Kolatkar was 22 years old. with difficulty, sometimes leaving his sentences unfinished, he My last phone conversation with Kolatkar was early in the said that 'The Renunciation of the Dog' and 'The Turnaround' third week of September. By then he had stopped going to Cafk had come out of the same experience. Though it seems from 'The Military, an Irani restaurant in Meadows Street, where over cups Turnaround' that he went on the walking trip alone, Kolatkar said of tea he routinely met with a close circle of friends on Thursday rhat a friend, the poet and painter Bandu Waze, had accompanied afternoons, as he had earlier met them, for more than three de- him. There is a reference to Waze, though not by name, in 'The cades, at Wayside Inn in Kala Ghoda, before the place shut down Renunciation of the Dog': 84 Partial Recall Death of a Poet 85

Tell me why the night before we started arriving at their father's house in Pune, unshaven and tired, look- Dogs were vainly ing like two sadhus. When they sat down to a meal, he said, it was Barking at the waves; as though they had not eaten in days. Indeed, accounts of eating, And tell my why in an unknown temple or more often not eating, recur throughout 'The Turnaround': Days and waves away A black dog dumbly I arrived in Nasik with From out of nowhere of ourselves yawned and leapt; peepul leaves between my teeth. And leaving us naked And shamefaced, 'The Renunciation of the Dog' does not mention the 'trial' in Tell me why the black dog died Rotegaon nor 'TheTurnaround' the dogs at the Gateway of India, Intrig~iinglybetween but both poems refer to the incident at the temple. In 'The God and our heads. Renunciation ofthe Dog' the incident is central to the poem ('And Kolatkar said that they spent the night before they started on the tell me why in an unknown temple/. . . A black dog dumbly', trip at the Gateway of India, which is where he heard the dogs etc.), whereas in 'The Turnaround', as everything else in it, the 'vainly1 Barking at the waves'. They had probably slept rough on incident, stripped down to essentials, like the language itself, is the footpath. It would be, for them, the first of many such nights. mentioned in passing. We know little about Waze. He and Kolatkar first met in 1952, As Kolatkar now narrated it to me, there had been a series of when Kolatkar was a student at the Sir J.J. School of Art. Dilip petty thefts in Rotegaon and the suspicion of the townsfolk fell Chitre, who was a close friend of both, describes Waze as 'a on the two tramps. Hauled up before a group of elders (this is maverick, self-taught artist . . . with immense energy, talent, and the 'trial' referred to in 'The Turnaround'), they had a hard time conviction that many of his academically cultivated colleagues proving their innocence. When they were finally allowed to lacked.' The 'academically cultivated colleagues' presumably leave, it was on the condition that they first clean up the temple referred to painters like Ambadas, Baburao Sadwelkar, and Tyeb ('drag the carcass away') where, on the one night they had spent Mehta, who were students at the art school roughly at the same in it, a 'black dog' had died 'Intriguingly between1 God and our time as Kolatkar. In 1954, during the early difficult months of heads.' Kolatkar said the dog had died at the midpoint between their marriage, when Kolatkar and his first wife Darshan Chhabda where they had lain down to sleep ('our heads') and the temple were living in Malad, Bombay, in a place that was little better than idol ('God'). a shack, Waze moved in with them. His presence, at a time when I asked Kolatkar about 'tinshod hegira'. He said 'tinshod' Kolatkar had no job and practically no money of his own, couldn't referred to Nana Patil's patri sarkar or 'horseshoe government'. have made matters easier. Patil was a well-known revolutionary leader during colonial times Makarand, whom I asked later about the walking trip, said he and ran a parallel government in the villages around Satara in the was then still at school but remembered Kolatkar and Waze 1940s. Those found de@ing its orders and collaborating with the 84 Partial Recall Death of a Poet 85

British had, horseshoe-fashion, tin nailed to the soles of their feet. 'The Renunciation of the Dog' is one of fourteen English Kolatkar, in the poem, is comparing his suffering after his hegira-- poems, collectively called 'journey poems', written during 1953- or flight--from Bombay ('It was walk walk walk and walk all the 4. Though they all came out of the same experience, the walking way') with the suffering of those punished by Patil's patri sarkar. trip through western Maharashtra, there is nothing in the poems His feet felt as though 'tinshod', 'The sun like a hammer on the that identifies them with a particular landscape. It is as though, in head'. He was by then at the end of his tether. The poem ends on 1953, Kolatkar had staked off his subject but not located the a note that, in more senses than one, is visionary: poetic resources to express it in. Never a man in a hurry, he was prepared to wait. The wait ended in 1967 when he wrote, in I stopped to straighten my dhoti Marathi, 'Mumbaina bhikes lavla'. Its English translation, 'The that had bunched up in my crotch Turnaround', he did in 1987, to read at the Stockholm festival. when sweat stung my eyes Kolatkar showed the 'journey poems' to his friends, one of and I could see. whom, Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, who later became a well-known A clean swept yard. art critic and writer on Marathi theatre, passed them on to Nissim A hut. An old man. Ezekiel. As editor of Quest, a new magazine funded by the Cong- A young woman in a doorway. ress for Cultural Freedom, Ezekiel was open to submissions. He also had an eye for talent and this time, in Kolatkar, he spotted a Lying 'prostrate' before the old man was a 'cut up can ofkerosene'. big one. He decided to carry 'The Renunciation of the Dog' in the Kolatkar now remembered that can. It was cut in half, he said, magazine's inaugural issue, which appeared in August 1955. It was and looked as though the old man had 'beaten the life out of it'. Kolatkar's first published poem in English. Around then, he and As he spoke, he seemed to be reliving the satoric experience of Ezekiel also met for the first time. For someone who was to fifty years ago: spend his next fifty years in advertising, Kolatkar's meeting with I thought about it for a mile or two. Ezekiel, fittingly enough, took place in the offices of Shilpi, where But I knew already Ezekiel had a job as copywriter. A line below 'The Hag' and 'Irani Restaurant Bombay' in that it was time to turn around. Chitre's Anthology ofMarathi Poetry: 1945-65 (1967) says 'Eng- About the 'personal crisis', though, which had led him to re- lish version by the poet', suggesting that the two poems are trans- nounce the city he was returning to, he did not say anything. lations. I knew from previous conversations with Kolatkar that There remained the matter of 'daisies'. When I asked him about he wrote them both in English and Marathi and considered them it, he said I should change it to vishnukranta. He had looked it up to be as much English poems as Marathi ones. Now, in Pune, as in a book on flowers, he said, but to no avail. The book didn't give Soonoo dabbed his lips with wet cotton wool to keep them moist, the English name. (As I found out later, the English name for he spoke about them again. The Marathi and English versions, he vishnukranta is speedwheel.) said, were 'very closely related'; 'they can bear close comparison'. 8 8 Partial Recall Death of a Poet 89 He also said he wrote them 'side by side'. Of 'The Hag' and Boatride, and if he said yes I'd put a tick against it. The ones I ticked 'Therdi' (its Marathi title) he said he would write one line in were 'Of an origin moot as cancer's', 'Dual', 'In a godforsaken Marathi and a corresponding line in English, or the other way hotel', and 'my son is dead'. The poems were typewritten and round. 'They run each other pretty close.' He also commented on some had obvious typos. A line in 'Dual' read 'the two might the rhyme scheme: 'There is no discrepancy.' declare harch thorns and live'. Chitre, whom 18rung up on reaching Pune, came with his wife 'Harch?' I asked Kolatkar. Viju to see Kolatkar. He had with him an office file and a spiral- 'Harsh.' bound book consisting of photocopies made on card paper. He In the list I had sent him, the one he had approved of, the asked me to look at them. He had recently finished a short film on 'Poems in English' section had eight poems. Now it had twelve. Kolatkar for the Sahitya Akademi, and the office file and the Clearly, The Boatride was going to be a bigger book than I had spiral-bound book, both of which Darshan had given him, were anticipated; I also began to see why Kolatkar wanted it to have part of the archival material he'd collected. The poems in the file an editor. consisted mostly of juvenilia, and some, with their references to 'a In 1966, Kolatkar joined an advertising studio, Design Unit, in begging bowl' and 'the changing landscape', looked like they be- which he was one of the partners. It did several successful cam- longed with the 'journey poems', which, as I found out later, they paigns, including one for Liberty shirts, which won the Commu- indeed did: nication Artists Guild award for best campaign of the year. The Destined to become a begging bowl Liberty factory had recently been gutted in a fire and the copy said We let- rise our clay 'Burnt but not extinguished'; Kolatkar did the visuals, one of And holding it in our hand which showed a shirt, with flames leaping from it.The studio was Wordlessly and worldlessly in existence for three years and everything in the spiral-bound To be filled and fulfilled book was from this period of Kolatkar's life. In fact, it was his We wandered Design Unit engagement diary, whose pages Darshan had re- In the wilderness of our heart arranged and interspersed with poems, drawings, and jottings. and Flipping through it was like peeking into an artist's lumber-room, crammed with bric-a-brac. It revealed more about Kolatkar's We retreated from ourselves To become the changing landscape public life as successful advertising professional and private life as And the mutable topography poet than a chapter in a biography would have. That accompanied us The first page had a drawing of a gladiolus, the curved handle And whispered in our ears of an umbrella sticking out through the leaves. Other drawings showed an umbrella hanging from a sickle moon; from an ante- I quickly went through the poems and read them out to lope's horns; from a man's wrist; stuck in a vase; safely tucked Kolatkar. If l liked something I asked him if I could put it in The behind a man's ear like the stub of a pencil; placed with a cup and 8 8 Partial Recall Death of a Poet 89 He also said he wrote them 'side by side'. Of 'The Hag' and Boatride, and if he said yes I'd put a tick against it. The ones I ticked 'Therdi' (its Marathi title) he said he would write one line in were 'Of an origin moot as cancer's', 'Dual', 'In a godforsaken Marathi and a corresponding line in English, or the other way hotel', and 'my son is dead'. The poems were typewritten and round. 'They run each other pretty close.' He also commented on some had obvious typos. A line in 'Dual' read 'the two might the rhyme scheme: 'There is no discrepancy.' declare harch thorns and live'. Chitre, whom 18rung up on reaching Pune, came with his wife 'Harch?' I asked Kolatkar. Viju to see Kolatkar. He had with him an office file and a spiral- 'Harsh.' bound book consisting of photocopies made on card paper. He In the list I had sent him, the one he had approved of, the asked me to look at them. He had recently finished a short film on 'Poems in English' section had eight poems. Now it had twelve. Kolatkar for the Sahitya Akademi, and the office file and the Clearly, The Boatride was going to be a bigger book than I had spiral-bound book, both of which Darshan had given him, were anticipated; I also began to see why Kolatkar wanted it to have part of the archival material he'd collected. The poems in the file an editor. consisted mostly of juvenilia, and some, with their references to 'a In 1966, Kolatkar joined an advertising studio, Design Unit, in begging bowl' and 'the changing landscape', looked like they be- which he was one of the partners. It did several successful cam- longed with the 'journey poems', which, as I found out later, they paigns, including one for Liberty shirts, which won the Commu- indeed did: nication Artists Guild award for best campaign of the year. The Destined to become a begging bowl Liberty factory had recently been gutted in a fire and the copy said We let- rise our clay 'Burnt but not extinguished'; Kolatkar did the visuals, one of And holding it in our hand which showed a shirt, with flames leaping from it.The studio was Wordlessly and worldlessly in existence for three years and everything in the spiral-bound To be filled and fulfilled book was from this period of Kolatkar's life. In fact, it was his We wandered Design Unit engagement diary, whose pages Darshan had re- In the wilderness of our heart arranged and interspersed with poems, drawings, and jottings. and Flipping through it was like peeking into an artist's lumber-room, crammed with bric-a-brac. It revealed more about Kolatkar's We retreated from ourselves To become the changing landscape public life as successful advertising professional and private life as And the mutable topography poet than a chapter in a biography would have. That accompanied us The first page had a drawing of a gladiolus, the curved handle And whispered in our ears of an umbrella sticking out through the leaves. Other drawings showed an umbrella hanging from a sickle moon; from an ante- I quickly went through the poems and read them out to lope's horns; from a man's wrist; stuck in a vase; safely tucked Kolatkar. If l liked something I asked him if I could put it in The behind a man's ear like the stub of a pencil; placed with a cup and 90 Partial Recall Death of a Poet 9 1 saucer, like a spoon, to stir the tea with. The text accompanying and 'a wicked gleam' in her eye. One imagines Kolatkar's face the drawings was always the same, 'Keep it'. Between the drawings bore a similar expression when he mischievously transformed were jottings, scribbles, messages ('Darshan Kolatkar 40 Daulat the humble invoice into a cheery greeting. Send me my green shirt'), expenditure figures ('Liquor 37.75'), What can be more uninspiring, more ordinary, or, sometimes, memos to himself ('plan & save cost; meetings fortnightly; how to more enchanting, than the tall stories men tell each other when inspire1 educate artists'), names and telephone numbers of clients, they meet in a restaurant over a cup of tea? In 'Three Cups ofTea' appointments to keep or cancel, seemingly useless scraps ofpaper Kolatkar reproduces verbatim, in 'street Hindi' (and translates preserved only because those who were close to him were farsighted into American English), three such stories, the third ofwhich goes and valued every scrap he put pen to. One page had written in as follows: it 'Ring Farooki'; 'Ring Pfizer'; 'Ring Mrs Chat. cancel 3.30 Tues. appt.'; '?Bandbox?'; '7.30 Kanti Shah'; and somewhere in the i went to burrna middle was also the drawing of a man with a V-shaped face where the film aag was running i went to see the film and arrows for arms and legs, the right arrow-leg pointing to the guy behind the ' 12.00 Jamshed'. Against a drawing ofa cut-out-like figure he had booking office window written, 'Imagine he is the client you hate most and stick a pin wants to see my passport anywhere.' And above it, 'Just had a frustrated meeting with a i said frustrated client. This fellow goes on and on. I do not like long all i wanna do telephonic conversations. The client is a Marwari, you know.' In is see a fucking film man an invoice to one Mrs Mukati dated '9/9/67', he had jokily i was arrested and sent back scribbled '10,000' under 'Quantity' and 'Good mornings' under to manipur no passport 'Please receive the following in good order and condition'. the police commissioner asked The scribble on the invoice, the drawings, and the poems, why did you go to burma? whether early or late, are part of the same vision. Enchanted by the prickface i said ordinary, Kolatkar made the ordinary enchanting. Which is why, what's there in india? however familiar one may be with his work, it's always as though one is encountering it for the first time. '[Tlhe dirtier the better' He wrote the poem in 1960, at the beginning of the revolutionary he says of the 'unwashed child' in a poem in Kala Ghoda, 'The decade that we associate more with Andy Warhol's 1964 Brillo Ogress', and the same might be said about the subjects he was Box exhibition and the music of John Cage than with Kolatkar's drawn to: the humbler the better. When the ogress, as Kolatkar poem; more with New York than Bombay. Yet the impulse behind calls her, gives the 'tough customer on her hands', 'a furious, their works is the same, to erase the boundaries between art and foaming boy', a good scrub, she has a 'wispy half-smile' on her face ordinary speech, or art and cardboard boxes, or art and fart, whose 90 Partial Recall Death of a Poet 9 1 saucer, like a spoon, to stir the tea with. The text accompanying and 'a wicked gleam' in her eye. One imagines Kolatkar's face the drawings was always the same, 'Keep it'. Between the drawings bore a similar expression when he mischievously transformed were jottings, scribbles, messages ('Darshan Kolatkar 40 Daulat the humble invoice into a cheery greeting. Send me my green shirt'), expenditure figures ('Liquor 37.75'), What can be more uninspiring, more ordinary, or, sometimes, memos to himself ('plan & save cost; meetings fortnightly; how to more enchanting, than the tall stories men tell each other when inspire1 educate artists'), names and telephone numbers of clients, they meet in a restaurant over a cup of tea? In 'Three Cups ofTea' appointments to keep or cancel, seemingly useless scraps ofpaper Kolatkar reproduces verbatim, in 'street Hindi' (and translates preserved only because those who were close to him were farsighted into American English), three such stories, the third ofwhich goes and valued every scrap he put pen to. One page had written in as follows: it 'Ring Farooki'; 'Ring Pfizer'; 'Ring Mrs Chat. cancel 3.30 Tues. appt.'; '?Bandbox?'; '7.30 Kanti Shah'; and somewhere in the i went to burrna middle was also the drawing of a man with a V-shaped face where the film aag was running i went to see the film and arrows for arms and legs, the right arrow-leg pointing to the guy behind the ' 12.00 Jamshed'. Against a drawing ofa cut-out-like figure he had booking office window written, 'Imagine he is the client you hate most and stick a pin wants to see my passport anywhere.' And above it, 'Just had a frustrated meeting with a i said frustrated client. This fellow goes on and on. I do not like long all i wanna do telephonic conversations. The client is a Marwari, you know.' In is see a fucking film man an invoice to one Mrs Mukati dated '9/9/67', he had jokily i was arrested and sent back scribbled '10,000' under 'Quantity' and 'Good mornings' under to manipur no passport 'Please receive the following in good order and condition'. the police commissioner asked The scribble on the invoice, the drawings, and the poems, why did you go to burma? whether early or late, are part of the same vision. Enchanted by the prickface i said ordinary, Kolatkar made the ordinary enchanting. Which is why, what's there in india? however familiar one may be with his work, it's always as though one is encountering it for the first time. '[Tlhe dirtier the better' He wrote the poem in 1960, at the beginning of the revolutionary he says of the 'unwashed child' in a poem in Kala Ghoda, 'The decade that we associate more with Andy Warhol's 1964 Brillo Ogress', and the same might be said about the subjects he was Box exhibition and the music of John Cage than with Kolatkar's drawn to: the humbler the better. When the ogress, as Kolatkar poem; more with New York than Bombay. Yet the impulse behind calls her, gives the 'tough customer on her hands', 'a furious, their works is the same, to erase the boundaries between art and foaming boy', a good scrub, she has a 'wispy half-smile' on her face ordinary speech, or art and cardboard boxes, or art and fart, whose 92 Partial Recall Death of a Poet sound Cage incorporated into his music. The impulse has its the burnt matchstick with the tea circle makes a rude origin in Marcel Duchamp's famous 'ready-mades', the snow compass, the heretic needle jabs a black star. shovels, bicycle wheels, bottle racks, and urinals he picked off the tables chairs mirrors are night that needs to be sewed peg. It was art by invoice. and cashier is where at seams it comes apart. By reproducing conversations heard in a restaurant in 'Three In 1962, when he wrote 'Irani Restaurant Bombay', Kolatkar Cups ofTea', Kolatkar introduced the Bombay urban vernacular, wouldn't have read Walter Benjamin's essays, which were not then the language of the bazaar, to Indian poetry; in 'Irani Restaurant available to the Anglophone world, nor would he have heard ofthe Bombay', he introduces seedy restaurant interiors and the bazaar arcade-haunting Parisian flaneur. But as a Bombay loafer himself, art on their walls. someone who daily trudged the city's footpaths, particularly the area of Kala Ghoda, he would have recognized the figure. the cockeyed shah of iran watches the cake 'Salo loafer!' says a character *in Cyrus Mistry's play Doongaji decompose carefully in a cracked showcase; House. Over the centuries, 'loafer' has become almost an Indian distracted only by a fly on the make word of abuse, suggesting a good-for-nothing who drifts through as it finds in a loafer's wrist an operational base. the city in self-absorbed fashion when, in fact, he is streetwise and dogmatically green and elaborate trees defeat his keen eye doesn't miss a thing. (Kolatkar himselfseldom walked breeze; the crooked swan begs pardon past a pavement bookstall without picking up a treasure.) This is if it disturb the pond; the road, neat true of the loafer even when he appears most relaxed, having tea, as a needle, points at a lovely cottage with a garden. say, in an Irani restaurant, a portrait of'the cockeyed shah of iran' displayed above the till and the whole place buzzing with flies. On the thirsty loafer sees the stylised perfection of the landscape, in a glass ofwater, wobble. these occasions, he is like a papyrologist in a library poring over a a sticky tea print for his scholarly attention classical document, though the objects he could be studying are singles out a verse from the blank testament of the table. the tables, chairs, mirrors, and bazaar prints in whose midst he sits. The bazaar print here described-the 'stylized perfection' of an instant of mirrors turns the tables on space. the landscape-brings to mind some of Bhupen Khakhar's yet un- while promoting darkness below the chair, the car painted early works like ResidencyBungalow (1 969). In Khakhar's in its rwo timing sleep dreams evenly and knows painting, the bungalow is a two-storey colonial house, complete dreaming to be an administrative problem. his cigarette with verandah, Doric columns, and pediment; 'a lovely cottage'. lit, the loafer. affecting the exactitude of a pedagogue, Leading to it is a ~ath,'neat as a needle', with 'elaborate trees' on places the burnt matchstick in the tea circle; and sees it rise: either side. In the background are more trees, painted in the same as when to identify a corpse one visits a morgue 'elaborate' fashion. In the foreground, where the 'crooked swan' and politely the corpse rises from a block of ice. might have been, is the ~ainter'sfriend, Gulammohammed Sheikh, 92 Partial Recall Death of a Poet sound Cage incorporated into his music. The impulse has its the burnt matchstick with the tea circle makes a rude origin in Marcel Duchamp's famous 'ready-mades', the snow compass, the heretic needle jabs a black star. shovels, bicycle wheels, bottle racks, and urinals he picked off the tables chairs mirrors are night that needs to be sewed peg. It was art by invoice. and cashier is where at seams it comes apart. By reproducing conversations heard in a restaurant in 'Three In 1962, when he wrote 'Irani Restaurant Bombay', Kolatkar Cups ofTea', Kolatkar introduced the Bombay urban vernacular, wouldn't have read Walter Benjamin's essays, which were not then the language of the bazaar, to Indian poetry; in 'Irani Restaurant available to the Anglophone world, nor would he have heard ofthe Bombay', he introduces seedy restaurant interiors and the bazaar arcade-haunting Parisian flaneur. But as a Bombay loafer himself, art on their walls. someone who daily trudged the city's footpaths, particularly the area of Kala Ghoda, he would have recognized the figure. the cockeyed shah of iran watches the cake 'Salo loafer!' says a character *in Cyrus Mistry's play Doongaji decompose carefully in a cracked showcase; House. Over the centuries, 'loafer' has become almost an Indian distracted only by a fly on the make word of abuse, suggesting a good-for-nothing who drifts through as it finds in a loafer's wrist an operational base. the city in self-absorbed fashion when, in fact, he is streetwise and dogmatically green and elaborate trees defeat his keen eye doesn't miss a thing. (Kolatkar himselfseldom walked breeze; the crooked swan begs pardon past a pavement bookstall without picking up a treasure.) This is if it disturb the pond; the road, neat true of the loafer even when he appears most relaxed, having tea, as a needle, points at a lovely cottage with a garden. say, in an Irani restaurant, a portrait of'the cockeyed shah of iran' displayed above the till and the whole place buzzing with flies. On the thirsty loafer sees the stylised perfection of the landscape, in a glass ofwater, wobble. these occasions, he is like a papyrologist in a library poring over a a sticky tea print for his scholarly attention classical document, though the objects he could be studying are singles out a verse from the blank testament of the table. the tables, chairs, mirrors, and bazaar prints in whose midst he sits. The bazaar print here described-the 'stylized perfection' of an instant of mirrors turns the tables on space. the landscape-brings to mind some of Bhupen Khakhar's yet un- while promoting darkness below the chair, the car painted early works like ResidencyBungalow (1 969). In Khakhar's in its rwo timing sleep dreams evenly and knows painting, the bungalow is a two-storey colonial house, complete dreaming to be an administrative problem. his cigarette with verandah, Doric columns, and pediment; 'a lovely cottage'. lit, the loafer. affecting the exactitude of a pedagogue, Leading to it is a ~ath,'neat as a needle', with 'elaborate trees' on places the burnt matchstick in the tea circle; and sees it rise: either side. In the background are more trees, painted in the same as when to identify a corpse one visits a morgue 'elaborate' fashion. In the foreground, where the 'crooked swan' and politely the corpse rises from a block of ice. might have been, is the ~ainter'sfriend, Gulammohammed Sheikh, 94 Partial Recall Death of a Poet' 9 5 sitting very stiffly in a chair, leaning a little to his right, his arm (David Sassoon),its commercial establishments (Lund & Blockley), resting on a round table. Behind him, sitting on a platform at- and its buildings (St Andrew's Church, Max Miiller Bhavan, tached to the house, are smaller figures. Pop art was an influence Prince of Wales Museum, Jehangir Art Gallery), began to take on Khakhar, and it is not surprising that both he and Kolatkar shape in his head. Asked in 1997 by Eunice de Souza, in one of responded to bazaar prints. They were, in their different mediums, the few interviews he gave, how he managed to write a poem like responding to the spirit of the age. 'The Ogress1,in which both the woman and the boy she's bath- Residency Bungalow was the house in Baroda that Khakhar ing 'emerge as complete human beings', Kolatkar replied, 'It's a and Sheikh shared, along with other painter friends of theirs. secret'. The secret, I think, lay in the gift he had of making com- And it was from this house, which belonged to Baroda University pletely impersonal the scene he was imaginatively engaging with, where Sheikh taught at the art school, that Sheikh and Khakhar while at the same time eschewing all isms and ideologies, identi- brought out their A4-sized little magazine Vrischik (1969-73), fying closely with each part. By the time he finished the sequence which means scorpion in Gujarati. Among those whose work ap- in 2004, to quote Joyce's famous remark to Frank Budgen about peared in its pages was Kolatkar, who contributed translations Ulyrres, it gave a picture of Kala Ghoda 'so complete that if it one of Namdeo, Janabai, and Muktabai to a special issue of Vrirchik day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstruct- (September-October 1970) on bhakti poetry. As Ezra Pound ed out of [his] book.' (from St Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, DC) wrote to Chak The first time I heard Kolatkar read was at Jehangir Art Gallery ('Dear Chak'), that is Arniya Chakravarty "'All flows" and the in 1967. Two years earlier, at Gallery Chemould in the same pattern is intricate.' premises, Khakhar had exhibited his first collages, their inspiration The view from a restaurant rather than a restaurant interior is the vividly coloured oleographs that had fascinated him since the subject of Kala Ghoda Poems. On most days, around break- boyhood. I cannot now recall what the occasion was, nor, apart fast time and again in the late afternoon, after the lunch crowd from the painter Jatin Das, who else read that evening, but had left, Kolatkar could be found at Wayside Inn in Rampart Kolatkar read a poem that he seemed to have improvised on the Row. He would usually be alone, except on Thursday afternoons, spot. It began 'My name is Arun Kolatkar' and was over in less than when all those who wished to see him joined his table and there a minute. He left immediately afterwards, making his way to could be as many as fifteen people around it. Sometime in the one of the Colaba bars, for he was, in the late 1960s, for about two early 1980s, the idea of writing a sequence of poems on the street and a half ears, a heavy drinker, stories of which are still told by life of Kala Ghoda, encompassing its varied population (the lavat- those who knew him at the time. To my surprise, the poem was ory attendant, the municipal sweeper, the kerosene vendor, the in the Design Unit diary, written out in his neat hand. He said I beggar-cum-tambourine player, the drug pusher, the shoeshine, could include it in The Boatride, then added, referring to the the 'ogress' who bathes the baby boy, the idli lady, the rat-poison poem, 'It's a disappearing trick.' There were also other poems in man, the cellist, the lawyer), its animals (pi-dog, crow), its statuary the diary which I thought were worthy of inclusion: 'Directions', 94 Partial Recall Death of a Poet' 9 5 sitting very stiffly in a chair, leaning a little to his right, his arm (David Sassoon),its commercial establishments (Lund & Blockley), resting on a round table. Behind him, sitting on a platform at- and its buildings (St Andrew's Church, Max Miiller Bhavan, tached to the house, are smaller figures. Pop art was an influence Prince of Wales Museum, Jehangir Art Gallery), began to take on Khakhar, and it is not surprising that both he and Kolatkar shape in his head. Asked in 1997 by Eunice de Souza, in one of responded to bazaar prints. They were, in their different mediums, the few interviews he gave, how he managed to write a poem like responding to the spirit of the age. 'The Ogress1,in which both the woman and the boy she's bath- Residency Bungalow was the house in Baroda that Khakhar ing 'emerge as complete human beings', Kolatkar replied, 'It's a and Sheikh shared, along with other painter friends of theirs. secret'. The secret, I think, lay in the gift he had of making com- And it was from this house, which belonged to Baroda University pletely impersonal the scene he was imaginatively engaging with, where Sheikh taught at the art school, that Sheikh and Khakhar while at the same time eschewing all isms and ideologies, identi- brought out their A4-sized little magazine Vrischik (1969-73), fying closely with each part. By the time he finished the sequence which means scorpion in Gujarati. Among those whose work ap- in 2004, to quote Joyce's famous remark to Frank Budgen about peared in its pages was Kolatkar, who contributed translations Ulyrres, it gave a picture of Kala Ghoda 'so complete that if it one of Namdeo, Janabai, and Muktabai to a special issue of Vrirchik day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstruct- (September-October 1970) on bhakti poetry. As Ezra Pound ed out of [his] book.' (from St Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, DC) wrote to Chak The first time I heard Kolatkar read was at Jehangir Art Gallery ('Dear Chak'), that is Arniya Chakravarty "'All flows" and the in 1967. Two years earlier, at Gallery Chemould in the same pattern is intricate.' premises, Khakhar had exhibited his first collages, their inspiration The view from a restaurant rather than a restaurant interior is the vividly coloured oleographs that had fascinated him since the subject of Kala Ghoda Poems. On most days, around break- boyhood. I cannot now recall what the occasion was, nor, apart fast time and again in the late afternoon, after the lunch crowd from the painter Jatin Das, who else read that evening, but had left, Kolatkar could be found at Wayside Inn in Rampart Kolatkar read a poem that he seemed to have improvised on the Row. He would usually be alone, except on Thursday afternoons, spot. It began 'My name is Arun Kolatkar' and was over in less than when all those who wished to see him joined his table and there a minute. He left immediately afterwards, making his way to could be as many as fifteen people around it. Sometime in the one of the Colaba bars, for he was, in the late 1960s, for about two early 1980s, the idea of writing a sequence of poems on the street and a half ears, a heavy drinker, stories of which are still told by life of Kala Ghoda, encompassing its varied population (the lavat- those who knew him at the time. To my surprise, the poem was ory attendant, the municipal sweeper, the kerosene vendor, the in the Design Unit diary, written out in his neat hand. He said I beggar-cum-tambourine player, the drug pusher, the shoeshine, could include it in The Boatride, then added, referring to the the 'ogress' who bathes the baby boy, the idli lady, the rat-poison poem, 'It's a disappearing trick.' There were also other poems in man, the cellist, the lawyer), its animals (pi-dog, crow), its statuary the diary which I thought were worthy of inclusion: 'Directions', 96 Partial Recall Death of a Poet 97

a 'foundypoem similar to 'Three Cups ofTea' but in a quite differ- leave. As we slipped out of the room, a message came from the ent linguistic register, was one and 'today i feel i do not belong', kitchen downstairs that lunch was ready. which makes the only reference to advertising in his poetry ('i'm The following day, on my way to see him, I wondered ifwe had god's gift to advertisinglis the refrain of my song'), another. For not already had our last conversation. Still, in the hope that he the most part, though, the diary consisted of ideas for future might be able to talk, I was carrying with me the original list of poems ('Write a bloody poem called beer. Make it bloody.'), notes thirty-two poems for The Boatride, since added to, as well as the and fragments in English and Marathi, and quick verbal sketches diary. But Kolatkar had other things on his mind. that captured a domestic moment or something he'd seen while He spoke about American popular music and its influence on walking idly down a road. For Kolatkar, writing was a zero waste him. He said that gangster films, cartoon strips, and blues had game; no thought that passed through his mind went unnoted. shaped his sense of the English language and he felt closer to the American idiom, particularly Black American speech, than to Once we got the rat behind the trunk, all we had to do was ram it British English. He mentioned Bessie Smith, Big Bill Broonzy, against the wall. and Muddy Waters-'Their names are like poems', he said-and quoted the harmonica player Blind Sonny Terry's remark, 'A your sulky lips are prawns harmonica player must know how to do a good fox chase.' One fork them with a shining smile reason why he liked blues, he said, was that the musicians were often untrained and improvised as they went along. He dwelt on the music's social history: how during the Depression blues on the same tile of the footpath performers moved from place to place, playing in honky-tonks, where that schoolgirl is standing a mad woman sat yesterday scratching with her nail sometimes under the protection of mobsters. He remembered the a rotten cunt Elton John song 'Don't shoot me I'm only the piano player'. and a big festering wound Blues (though it can have a spiritual side) and bhakti poetry on her shaven head are, in intent, markedly different from each other. One belongs to the secular world; the other addresses itself to god. There are, however, parallels between them. Each draws its images from a Leap clear, my lion, through common pool, each limits itself to a small number of themes that the ring of fire. Mind the mane, it keeps returning to, and each speaks in the idiom of the street. the hind legs and the tail. Do it again. They can sound remarkably alike. It's a long old road, but I'm gonna find the end. I wanted to ask Kolatkar about these poems and fragments but It's a long old road, but I'm gonna find the end. his voice had grown faint and he closed his eyes. It was time to And when I get there I'm gonna shake hands with a friend. 98 Partial Recall Death of a Poet 99 could be Tukaram but is Bessie Smith, just as 'Get lost, brother, After Elton John's 'Don't shoot me', Kolatkar recalled some if you don't1 Fancy our kind of living' could be blues but are the more songs: Big Mama Thornton's 'Hound Dog' and Elvis lines of a Tukaram song, in Kolatkar's 'blues' translation. In his Presley's 'Blue Suede Shoes' and 'Money Honey'. His voice, which use of diction, Kolatkar saw himself very much in the blues- so far had been a whisper, suddenly grew loud as he almost sang bhakti tradition. He once said to me that he wrote a Marathi that out the words: any Marathi speaker could follow. He also said that he was not finished with a translation until he had made it look like a poem You ain't nothin' but a hound dog cryin' all the time. by Arun Kolatkar. You ain't nothin' but a hound dog cryin' all the time. Well, you ain't never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine. The parallels between Kolatkar's work and blues do not end there. Here is the blues singer Tommy McClennan, standing and beside a road in the Mississippi delta, waiting for a bus in the hot sun: Well, you can knock me down, Step in my face. . . Here comes that Greyhound with his tongue hanging out on the side. Do anything that you want to do, but uh-uh, Here comes that Greyhound with his tongue hanging out Honey, lay off of my shoes on the side. Don't you step on my blue suede shoes. You have to buy a ticket if you want to ride. and And here is Kolatkar in jejuri: You know, the landlord rang my front door bell. I let it ring for a long, long spell. The bus goes round in a circle. I went to the window, Stops inside the bus station and stands I peeped through the blind, purring softly in front of the priest. And asked him to tell me what's on his mind. A catgrin on his face He said, and a live, ready to eat held between its teeth. Money, honey. Money, honey. ('The Priest') Money, honey, if you want to get along with me.

Observe, too, the stanza unit. It was with the development of He said he had a record collection of about 75 LPs, which he the three-line verse, which Kolatkar uses here and throughout gifted to the National Centre for the Performing Arts. He would much of Kala Ghoda Poems, that the blues became a distinct- have gifted them, in all likelihood, in 1981, when he moved house ive poetic form. from Bakhtavar in Colaba, where he had lived since 1970, to a 100 Partial Recall Death of a Poet 10 1 much smaller one-room apartment in Prabhadevi, Dadar. Around It was only a matter of time before books reappeared in his then, he also sold off his substantial collection of music and apartment, covering a wall from end to end. Scanning the titles, science fiction books. The first time I visited him in Prabhadevi, I found no poetry or fiction; instead, history. When, in her 1 was surprised that there were hardly any books in the room. I interview with him, Eunice de Souza remarked on the books especially missed the volumes of American and European poets, on Bosnia on his shelves, Kolatkar dwelt at length on his read- which he kept in a glass-fronted bookcase in Bakhtavar and which ing habits: I would eye enviously each time I passed them. Those, he said, he I want to reclaim everything I consider my tradition. I am particularly had not sold off but because ofthe shortage ofspace had put them interested in history of all kinds, the beginning of man, archaeology, in storage with a friend. I remember asking if he regretted not histories of everything from religion to objects, bread-making, paper, having his books with him and he said that having them in his clothes, people, the evolution of man's knowledge of things, ideas head was more important than their physical presence. This parti- about the world or his own body. The history of man's trying to make cular conversation with him came back to me recently while sense of the universe and his place in it may take me to Sumerian reading Susan Sontag's essay on Canetti, 'Mind as Passion'. To writing. It's a browser's approach, not a scholarly one; it's one big interpolate from it, Kolatkar's passion for books was not, as it was supermarket situation. I read across disciplines and don't necessarily read a book from beginning to end. I jump back and forth from one for Walter Benjamin, 'a passion for books as material objects (rare subject to another. I find reading documents as interesting as reading books, first editions).' Rather, the 'ideal' was 'to put the books poetry. I am interested in the natureofhistory, which I find ambiguous. inside one's head; the real library is only a mnemonic system.' To What is history? While reading it one doesn't know. It's a floating this library in the head, because of his prodigious memory, situation, a nagging quest. It's difficult to arrive at any certainties. Kolatkar, at all times, had complete access. I never saw him reach What you get are versions of history, with nothing final about them. out for a book, but whenever he spoke about one, whether it Some parts are better lit than others, or the light may change, or one was a Latin American novel, The Tale of the Genji, or a Sanskrit may see the object differently. I also like looking at legal, medical, and bhand, it was as though he had it open in front of him, and if non-sacred texts-schoolboys' texts from Egypt, a list of household objects in Oxyrhincus, a list of books in the collection of a Peshwa he remembered a funny passage would, while narrating it, almost wife, correspondence about obtaining a pair of spectacles, deeds of roll on the floor, gently slapping his thighs. sale, marriage and divorce contracts. One dimension ofmy interest in Kolatkar may not have had space for books, but he continued all this is literary, for example, in the Bible as literature. The Song of to buy them as before, on ascale that would match the acquisitions Solomon goes back to Egypt and Assyria. I like following these trails. ofa small city library. (He purchased newspapers on the same scale too; five morning and three evening papers every day.) He bought Like all autodidacts, Kolatkar's dream was to know ('to reclaim') books, read them, and passed them on to his friends. This is everything, to hold all knowledge, like a shining sphere, in the how I acquired my copy of Mrquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, palm of the hand. Nor did he give up reading fiction altogether. which he had bought in hardback as soon as it became available One winter I was in Bombay he was reading W.G. Sebald's at Strand Book Stall. Austerlitz. 100 Partial Recall Death of a Poet 10 1 much smaller one-room apartment in Prabhadevi, Dadar. Around It was only a matter of time before books reappeared in his then, he also sold off his substantial collection of music and apartment, covering a wall from end to end. Scanning the titles, science fiction books. The first time I visited him in Prabhadevi, I found no poetry or fiction; instead, history. When, in her 1 was surprised that there were hardly any books in the room. I interview with him, Eunice de Souza remarked on the books especially missed the volumes of American and European poets, on Bosnia on his shelves, Kolatkar dwelt at length on his read- which he kept in a glass-fronted bookcase in Bakhtavar and which ing habits: I would eye enviously each time I passed them. Those, he said, he I want to reclaim everything I consider my tradition. I am particularly had not sold off but because ofthe shortage ofspace had put them interested in history of all kinds, the beginning of man, archaeology, in storage with a friend. I remember asking if he regretted not histories of everything from religion to objects, bread-making, paper, having his books with him and he said that having them in his clothes, people, the evolution of man's knowledge of things, ideas head was more important than their physical presence. This parti- about the world or his own body. The history of man's trying to make cular conversation with him came back to me recently while sense of the universe and his place in it may take me to Sumerian reading Susan Sontag's essay on Canetti, 'Mind as Passion'. To writing. It's a browser's approach, not a scholarly one; it's one big interpolate from it, Kolatkar's passion for books was not, as it was supermarket situation. I read across disciplines and don't necessarily read a book from beginning to end. I jump back and forth from one for Walter Benjamin, 'a passion for books as material objects (rare subject to another. I find reading documents as interesting as reading books, first editions).' Rather, the 'ideal' was 'to put the books poetry. I am interested in the natureofhistory, which I find ambiguous. inside one's head; the real library is only a mnemonic system.' To What is history? While reading it one doesn't know. It's a floating this library in the head, because of his prodigious memory, situation, a nagging quest. It's difficult to arrive at any certainties. Kolatkar, at all times, had complete access. I never saw him reach What you get are versions of history, with nothing final about them. out for a book, but whenever he spoke about one, whether it Some parts are better lit than others, or the light may change, or one was a Latin American novel, The Tale of the Genji, or a Sanskrit may see the object differently. I also like looking at legal, medical, and bhand, it was as though he had it open in front of him, and if non-sacred texts-schoolboys' texts from Egypt, a list of household objects in Oxyrhincus, a list of books in the collection of a Peshwa he remembered a funny passage would, while narrating it, almost wife, correspondence about obtaining a pair of spectacles, deeds of roll on the floor, gently slapping his thighs. sale, marriage and divorce contracts. One dimension ofmy interest in Kolatkar may not have had space for books, but he continued all this is literary, for example, in the Bible as literature. The Song of to buy them as before, on ascale that would match the acquisitions Solomon goes back to Egypt and Assyria. I like following these trails. ofa small city library. (He purchased newspapers on the same scale too; five morning and three evening papers every day.) He bought Like all autodidacts, Kolatkar's dream was to know ('to reclaim') books, read them, and passed them on to his friends. This is everything, to hold all knowledge, like a shining sphere, in the how I acquired my copy of Mrquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, palm of the hand. Nor did he give up reading fiction altogether. which he had bought in hardback as soon as it became available One winter I was in Bombay he was reading W.G. Sebald's at Strand Book Stall. Austerlitz. 102 Partial Recall Death of a Poet 103

He readwidely, and ifa question interested him, he would track Gananath Obeyesekere's The Cult of the Goddess Pattini; for down everything there was on it. When he was contemplating a 'Nadezhda', her two volumes of autobiography and Mandelstam's poem on Heloise for Bhijki khi (2003), each of whose twenty- prose; and for 'Susan', Susan Sontag's OnPhotography. 'Hadamma' five poems is centred around a sorrowing woman-from Isis, was based on an Inuit folktale and 'Maimun', the Qureshi girl Cassandra, and the Virgin Mary to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Susan from Haryana who was the victim of an honour killing in 1997, Sontag, and his own sister, Rajani, who lost her only son, a cadet on a clutch of newspaper reports. The story was still being re- pilot in the Indian Air Force, in an air crash-he collected a shelf- ported in the Indian press when Kolatkar wrote the poem. In full of books on the subject. Eventually he abandoned the idea of 'Ashru' (Tears), the first poem in the book, he uses the word writing on Heloise, saying to me that he had not been able to find 'lysozyme', an enzyme found in human tears and egg white, which a way into the story, by which he meant a new perspective on it he came across in a newspaper article on the work of the molecu- that would make it different from a retelling. He faced a similar lar biologist Francis Crick, and 'Kim' is a reference to Nick Ut's problem with Hypatia ofAlexandria, which he solved by making famous 1972photograph showing nine-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing St Cyril, who is thought to have had a hand in her murder, the her village outside Saigon after a napalm attack. He does not poem's speaker. provide the poems with notes, but had he done so the eclecticism At 393 pages, Bhijki khi (which translates as Tear-stained of his sources would be reminiscent of Marianne Moore. Notebook) is among all of Kolatkar's works the longest. It is also Bhijki khi won the Sahitya Akademi Award in Marathi but the most complex. Just to enumerate the books and authors he otherwise the critics, daunted by its range of references, greeted it read for it is to outline a course in world literature. For 'Trimary' with silence. Kolatkar, unfortunately, never got round to translating (Three Maries), the New Testament; for 'Laila', Fuzuli's Leyla its poems into English. 'Sarpa Satra', the penultimate poem in the andMejnun in Sofi Huri's translation (Kolatkar said he found the book, appears to be an exception but it is not. I asked him about introductory essay by Alessio Bombaci on the history of the poem it now and he said that he started writing it in Marathi first but, particularly useful); for 'Apala', the Rg Veda, Rg Edit Darshan, compelled by the subject, also decided to write it in English. Like and Chitrao Shastri's Prachin Charitra Kosh; for 'Isis', E.A. Wallis 'The Hag' and 'Irani Restaurant Bombay', it exists independent- Budge; for 'Cassandra', Homer, Virgil, Robert Graves, and Robert ly in both languages. Payne (The Gold of Troy); for 'Muktayakka', the Sunyasampa- Based in the frame story of the Mahabharata, Sarpa Satra is dane; for 'Rabi'a', Farid-ud-Din Attar and Margaret Smith; for also a contemporary tale of revenge and retribution, mass murder 'Hypatia', Edmund Gibbon, Charles Kingsley, E.M. Forster, and and genocide, and one ~erson'sattempt to break the cycle. In the Maria Dzielska; for 'Po Chu-i', Arthur Waley; for 'Helenche story, the divine hero Arjuna decides, 'Just for kicks, maybe', to guntaval' (Helen's Hair), Robert Payne and Peter Green (Alexander burn down the Khandava forest. In a passage of great lyrical to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age); for beauty, Kolatkar describes the conflagation in which everything 'Kannagi', Alain Danielou's translation of Shilappadikaram and gets destroyed, 'elephants, gazelles, antelopes' and 102 Partial Recall Death of a Poet 103

He read widely, and ifa question interested him, he would track Gananath Obeyesekere's The Cult of the Goddess Pattini; for down everything there was on it. When he was contemplating a 'Nadezhda', her two volumes of autobiography and Mandelstam's poem on Heloise for Bhijki Vahi (2003), each of whose twenty- prose; and for 'Susan', Susan Sontag's On Photography. 'Hadamma' five poems is centred around a sorrowing woman-from Isis, was based on an Inuit folktale and 'Maimun', the Qureshi girl Cassandra, and the Virgin Mary to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Susan from Haryana who was the victim of an honour killing in 1997, Sontag, and his own sister, Rajani, who lost her only son, a cadet on a clutch of newspaper reports. The story was still being re- pilot in the Indian Air Force, in an air crash-he collected a shelf- ported in the Indian press when Kolatkar wrote the poem. In full of books on the subject. Eventually he abandoned the idea of 'Ashru' (Tears), the first poem in the book, he uses the word writing on Heloise, saying to me that he had not been able to find 'lysozyme', an enzyme found in human tears and egg white, which a way into the story, by which he meant a new perspective on it he came across in a newspaper article on the work of the molecu- that would make it different from a retelling. He faced a similar lar biologist Francis Crick, and 'Kim' is a reference to Nick Ut's problem with Hypatia ofAlexandria, which he solved by making famous 1972 photograph showing nine-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing St Cyril, who is thought to have had a hand in her murder, the her village outside Saigon after a napalm attack. He does not poem's speaker. provide the poems with notes, but had he done so the eclecticism At 393 pages, Bhijki Vahi (which translates as Tear-stained of his sources would be reminiscent of Marianne Moore. Notebook) is among all of Kolatkar's works the longest. It is also Bhijki Vahi won the Sahitya Akademi Award in Marathi but the most complex. Just to enumerate the books and authors he otherwise the critics, daunted by its range of references, greeted it read for it is to outline a course in world literature. For 'Trimary' with silence. Kolatkar, unfortunately, never got round to translating (Three Maries), the New Testament; for 'Laila', Fuzuli's Leyla its poems into English. 'Sarpa Satra', the penultimate poem in the andMejnun in Sofi Huri's translation (Kolatkar said he found the book, appears to be an exception but it is not. I asked him about introductory essay by Alessio Bombaci on the historj~ofthe poem it now and he said that he started writing it in Marathi first but, particularly useful); for 'Apala', the Rg Veda, Rg Vedic Darshan, compelled by the subject, also decided to write it in English. Like and Chitrao Shastri's Prachin Charitra Kosh; for 'Isis', E.A. Wallis 'The Hag' and 'Irani Restaurant Bombay', it exists independent- Budge; for 'Cassandra', Homer, Virgil, Robert Graves, and Robert ly in both languages. Payne (The Gold of Troy); for 'Muktayakka', the Sunyasampa- Based in the frame story of the Mahabharata, Sarpa Satra is dane; for 'Rabi'a', Farid-ud-Din Attar and Margaret Smith; for also a contemporary tale of revenge and retribution, mass murder 'Hypatia', Edmund Gibbon, Charles Kingsley, E.M. Forster, and and genocide, and one ~erson'sattempt to break the cycle. In the Maria Dzielska; for 'Po Chu-i', Arthur Waley; for 'Helenche story, the divine hero Arjuna decides, 'Just for kicks, maybe', to guntaval' (Helen's Hair), Robert Payne and I'eter Green (Alexander burn down the Khandava forest. In a passage of great lyrical to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age); for beauty, Kolatkar describes the conflagation in which everything 'Kannagi', Alain Danielou's translation of Shilappadikaram and gets destroyed, 'elephants, gazelles, antelopes' and 102 Partial Recall Death ofa Poet 103

He read widely, and ifa question interested him, he would track Gananath Obeyesekere's The Cult of the Goddess Pattini; for down everything there was on it. When he was contemplating a 'Nadezhda', her two volumes of autobiography and Mandelstam's poem on Heloise for Bhijki Vahi (2003), each of whose twenty- prose; and for 'Susan', Susan Sontag's On Photography. 'Hadamma' five poems is centred around a sorrowing woman-from Isis, was based on an Inuit folktale and 'Maimun', the Qureshi girl Cassandra, and the Virgin Mary to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Susan from Haryana who was the victim of an honour killing in 1997, Sontag, and his own sister, Rajani, who lost her only son, a cadet on a clutch of newspaper reports. The story was still being re- pilot in the Indian Air Force, in an air crash-he collected a shelf- ported in the Indian press when Kolatkar wrote the poem. In full of books on the subject. Eventually he abandoned the idea of 'Ashru' (Tears), the first poem in the book, he uses the word writing on Heloise, saying to me that he had not been able to find 'lysozyme', an enzyme found in human tears and egg white, which a way into the story, by which he meant a new perspective on it he came across in a newspaper article on the work of the molecu- that would make it different from a retelling. He faced a similar lar biologist Francis Crick, and 'Kim' is a reference to Nick Ut's problem with Hypatia ofAlexandria, which he solved by making famous 1972 photograph showing nine-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing St Cyril, who is thought to have had a hand in her murder, the her village outside Saigon after a napalm attack. He does not poem's speaker. provide the poems with notes, but had he done so the eclecticism At 393 pages, Bhijki Vahi (which translates as Tear-stained of his sources would be reminiscent of Marianne Moore. Notebook) is among all of Kolatkar's works the longest. It is also Bhijki Vahi won the Sahitya Akademi Award in Marathi but the most complex. Just to enumerate the books and authors he otherwise the critics, daunted by its range of references, greeted it read for it is to outline a course in world literature. For 'Trimary' with silence. Kolatkar, unfortunately, never got round to translating (Three Maries), the New Testament; for 'Laila', Fuzuli's Leyla its poems into English. 'Sarpa Satra', the penultimate poem in the andMejnun in Sofi Huri's translation (Kolatkar said he found the book, appears to be an exception but it is not. I asked him about introductory essay by Alessio Bombaci on the historj~ofthe poem it now and he said that he started writing it in Marathi first but, particularly useful); for 'Apala', the Rg Veda, Rg Vedic Darshan, compelled by the subject, also decided to write it in English. Like and Chitrao Shastri's Prachin Charitra Kosh; for 'Isis', E.A. Wallis 'The Hag' and 'Irani Restaurant Bombay', it exists independent- Budge; for 'Cassandra', Homer, Virgil, Robert Graves, and Robert ly in both languages. Payne (The Gold of Troy); for 'Muktayakka', the Sunyasampa- Based in the frame story of the Mahabharata, Sarpa Satra is dane; for 'Rabi'a', Farid-ud-Din Attar and Margaret Smith; for also a contemporary tale of revenge and retribution, mass murder 'Hypatia', Edmund Gibbon, Charles Kingsley, E.M. Forster, and and genocide, and one ~erson'sattempt to break the cycle. In the Maria Dzielska; for 'Po Chu-i', Arthur Waley; for 'Helenche story, the divine hero Arjuna decides, 'Just for kicks, maybe', to guntaval' (Helen's Hair), Robert Payne and I'eter Green (Alexander burn down the Khandava forest. In a passage of great lyrical to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age); for beauty, Kolatkar describes the conflagation in which everything 'Kannagi', Alain Danielou's translation of Shilappadikaram and gets destroyed, 'elephants, gazelles, antelopes' and Partial Recall Death of a Poet

people as well. than just Simple folk, - the latest episode of the Mahabharata and the daily statistics of death; children of the forest who had lived there happily for generations, rediscover simpler pleasures- since time began. fly kites, collect wild flowers, make love. They've gone without a trace. With their language Life seems that sounded like the burbling of a brook, to return to normal. their songs that sounded like the twittering of birds, But do not be deceived. and the secrets of their shamans Though, sooner or later, who could cure any sickness these celebrations of hatred too come to an end by casting spells with their special flutes made from the hollow like everything else, wingbones of red-crested cranes. the fire-the fire lit for the purpose- can never be put out. Among those who die in the 'holocaust' is a snake-woman, to avenge whose loss her husband, Takshaka, kills Arj~ 's grandson, His Bombay friends had meanwhile been arriving through the Parikshit. Parikshit's son, Janamejaya, then holds the b.Ldsesacrifice, morning to see Kolatkar. It was aThursday, and the crowd around the Sarpa Satra, to rid the world of snakes: 'My vengeance will be his bed-Adil Jussawalla, Ashok Shahane, Raghoo Dandavate, swift and terrible./ I will not rest1 until I've exterminated them all.' Kiran Nagarkar, Ratnakar Sohoni-was a little like the Thursday Though the mass killing of snakes symbolically represents the afternoon crowd around his table at Wayside Inn. Also in the room many genocides of the last century, Kolatkar, by taking a story were Dilip and Viju Chitre. Sohoni was Kolatkar's Prabhadevi from an ancient epic, brings the whole of human history under neighbour and had known him since his Design Unit days. Hewas the scrutiny of his moral vision. In the Mahabharata, Aastika, carrying an accordion file, bulging with papers, which he handed whose mother is herself a snake-woman and Takshaka's sister, is over to me. Separately, he also gave me a letter. It was from Edwin able to stop the sacrifice midway, but Kolatkar's poem offers no Frank, the editor of New York Review Books Classics. Frank had such consolation: been in touch with Kolatkar overjduri, which he acquired for When these things come to an end, the series in May 2004. When Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpn people find Satra appeared, Kolatkar had sent him the books and Frank's other subjects to talk about letter was an acknowledgement. I read it out. Death of a Poet 106 Partial Recall 107 interest in blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll took a new turn. He learnt September 3, 2004 musical notation and took lessons in the guitar and, from Arjun Shejwal, the pakhawaj, and started to write songs, recording, in Dear Mr. Kolatkar, Many thanks for sending me Sarpa Satra and the long awaited Kala 1973, a demo consisting of 'Poor Man', 'Nobody', 'Joe and Bongo Ghoda poems. I have read both books with enormous pleasure and Bongo', and 'Radio Message from a Quake Hit Town'. Three of look forward to doing so again many times. The acuteness ofdescrip- these are 'found' songs, further examples of Kolatkar's trans- tion, the attentive humanity, and the humour are all extraordinary; formations of the commonplace. 'Joe and Bongo Bongo' and above all, I am struck by how the poems, as true poems will, succeed 'Radio Message from a Quake Hit Town' were based on newspaper in making time-a time in which the world becomes real and welcome reports and 'Poor Man' took its inspiration from the piece ofpaper and which they offer to the reader as a gift. Here's to idlis! that beggars thrust before passengers waiting in bus queues and I also want to say how beautifully put together the two books are. And many thanks for the signedcopy ofjejuriwhich Amit Chaudhuri at railway stations. It gives the beggar's life story and ends with has forwarded to me. an appeal for money. 'Poor Man' has an ananda-lahari in the I cannot read Marathi, I am sad to say, but are there any English background, an instrument that is popular with both beggars and translations of any of the poems you have written in that language? mendicants, particularly the Baul singers of Bengal. While its Pras Prakashan's brief description makes me eager to find out what plangent music is truthful to the origin of the song, the beggar's I can. appeal, it also provides a nice contrast to the outrageous lyrics in Where, finally, should I turn to purchase additional copies of the which the 'poor man from apoor land' is an aspiring rock star, who two new books? is singing not for his next meal but because he wants 'a villa in the With deepest appreciation and admiration, south of france' and 'a gold disk on [his] wall'. In October 1973 one of Kolatkar's friends, Avinash Gupte, who Yours, Edwin Frank was travelling to London and New York, tried to interest agents ~ and music companies there in the demo but nothing came of the effort. Kolatkar's shot at the 'gold disk' had ended in disappointment 'Nice letter', Kolatkar said after I finished reading it. And after and he abandoned all future musical plans. He filed away the a pause, 'What did you say about September?' 'September 3. It's the date on the letter', I said. 1 'Drunk & other songs', never to return to them again. Instead, in November-December of that year, he sat down and wrote/iuri, I had visited Kolatkar in July, when Kala Ghoda Poems and I completing it in a few weeks. Sarpa Satra were released, and had told him before leaving that I One by one, read out the 'Drunk & other songs', many of would try and visit him again in August. I couldn't go, but in I which I was seeing for the first time. I wanted to know which ones anticipation of my coming he had set aside the poems which to include in The Boatride and, in case there was more than he wanted me to see, putting them in the accordion file. The first one version, which version to use. I read them in the order I folder I pulled out from it was marked 'Drunk & other songs. found them. Late sixties, early seventies'. This was the period when Kolatkar's Death of a Poet 106 Partial Recall 107 interest in blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll took a new turn. He learnt September 3, 2004 musical notation and took lessons in the guitar and, from Arjun Shejwal, the pakhawaj, and started to write songs, recording, in Dear Mr. Kolatkar, Many thanks for sending me Sarpa Satra and the long awaited Kala 1973, a demo consisting of 'Poor Man', 'Nobody', 'Joe and Bongo Ghoda poems. I have read both books with enormous pleasure and Bongo', and 'Radio Message from a Quake Hit Town'. Three of look forward to doing so again many times. The acuteness ofdescrip- these are 'found' songs, further examples of Kolatkar's trans- tion, the attentive humanity, and the humour are all extraordinary; formations of the commonplace. 'Joe and Bongo Bongo' and above all, I am struck by how the poems, as true poems will, succeed 'Radio Message from a Quake Hit Town' were based on newspaper in making time-a time in which the world becomes real and welcome reports and 'Poor Man' took its inspiration from the piece ofpaper and which they offer to the reader as a gift. Here's to idlis! that beggars thrust before passengers waiting in bus queues and I also want to say how beautifully put together the two books are. And many thanks for the signedcopy ofjejuriwhich Amit Chaudhuri at railway stations. It gives the beggar's life story and ends with has forwarded to me. an appeal for money. 'Poor Man' has an ananda-lahari in the I cannot read Marathi, I am sad to say, but are there any English background, an instrument that is popular with both beggars and translations of any of the poems you have written in that language? mendicants, particularly the Baul singers of Bengal. While its Pras Prakashan's brief description makes me eager to find out what plangent music is truthful to the origin of the song, the beggar's I can. appeal, it also provides a nice contrast to the outrageous lyrics in Where, finally, should I turn to purchase additional copies of the which the 'poor man from apoor land' is an aspiring rock star, who two new books? is singing not for his next meal but because he wants 'a villa in the With deepest appreciation and admiration, south of france' and 'a gold disk on [his] wall'. In October 1973 one of Kolatkar's friends, Avinash Gupte, who Yours, Edwin Frank was travelling to London and New York, tried to interest agents ~ and music companies there in the demo but nothing came of the effort. Kolatkar's shot at the 'gold disk' had ended in disappointment 'Nice letter', Kolatkar said after I finished reading it. And after and he abandoned all future musical plans. He filed away the a pause, 'What did you say about September?' 'September 3. It's the date on the letter', I said. 1 'Drunk & other songs', never to return to them again. Instead, in November-December of that year, he sat down and wrote/iuri, I had visited Kolatkar in July, when Kala Ghoda Poems and I completing it in a few weeks. Sarpa Satra were released, and had told him before leaving that I One by one, read out the 'Drunk & other songs', many of would try and visit him again in August. I couldn't go, but in I which I was seeing for the first time. I wanted to know which ones anticipation of my coming he had set aside the poems which to include in The Boatride and, in case there was more than he wanted me to see, putting them in the accordion file. The first one version, which version to use. I read them in the order I folder I pulled out from it was marked 'Drunk & other songs. found them. Late sixties, early seventies'. This was the period when Kolatkar's Partial Recall Death of a Poet 109

tape me drunk 'Drunk', he said, by way of categorizing the song. During his my sister drinking days, Kolatkarhad had his run-ins with the police, being my chipmunk picked up for disorderly behaviour on at least one occasion. Years spittle spittle spittle later, he recalled the jail experience in Kala Ghoda Poems: gather my spittle Nearer home, in Bombay itself, but never in a hospital the miserable bunch don't tie me down of drunks, delinquents, smalltime crooks promise me pet and the usual suspects don't tie me down have already been served their morning kanji to a hospital bed in Byculla jail. my salvation i believe . is in a basket of broken eggs They've been herded together now yolk on my sleeve and subjected and vomit on my legs to an hour of force-fed education.

o world ('Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda') what is my worth o streets But the poems I was reading to him from the folder were nearer where is my shirt in time to the experience they described:

begone my psychiatrist nothing's wrong with me man i'm ok boo it's just that i haven't had a drink all day but before you do lend me your trousers let me finish my first glass of beer because in mine i've ~issed and this shakiness will disappear

o world ('Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda') what is my worth o streets But the poems I was reading to him from the folder were nearer where is my shirt in time to the experience they described:

you'll have to light my cigarette i can't strike a match 'That sounds honourable enough', Kolatkar joked after I'd but see the difference once the first drink's down the hatch finished reading it. I read out the next one: 'Straight drunk', came his response, quicltly. To other songs, after hi constable tell me what's your collar size hearing the first line, he said I could decide later whether to same as mine i bet this shirt will fit you right include them or not and to those towards the end he said 'Skip'. the shirt is yours feel it don't you like the fall Barring two, I have included all the songs in the folder. They appear in a separate section, 'Words for Music'. all you got to do to get it is make one phone call . . . I Death of a Poet 110 Partial Recall their masts at variance A second folder contained his translations from Marathi, six of islam which I had not seen before, 'Malkhamb', 'Buildings', and the four mary 'Hospital Poems'. In a note given on the same sheet as the poem, dolphin Kolatkar says that 'malkhamb' 'means, literally, "a wrestler's pole". 1t'~a smooth, wooden, vertical pole buried in the gound. A com- their names appearing music mon feature found in all Indian gyms. Used by wrestlers in training and by gymnasts to display their skill.' Remembering his ('the boat ride') boyhood in Kolhapur, Kolatkar said that he used to be quite good Kolatkar looked at the photographs but didn't say anything. Then at the malkhamb. Ashok Shahane asked him something to which he replied that The 'Hospital Poems' were not a typescript but a photocopy they could discuss it once he aeturned to Bombay. It was the from a magazine and I asked him where they'd been published. He last thing he said this side of silence. He died two days later, said 'Santan'. I wondered what he meant and Adil helped me out. around midnight. He said that the poems had appeared in Santan Rodriguez's magazine Kavi, which had brought out a special Kolatkar number in 1978. Referring to 'The Turnaround', Kolatkar said that the book in which he'd looked for the English equivalent of vishnukranta was in the accordion file. 'It has a description of the flower', he said. I hadn't had a chance to explore the file but did so now and found Flowers of the Sahayadri (2001) by Shrikant Ingalhalikar in one of the pockets. 'Your work is in good hands', Adil said to Kolatkar, and repeated the sentence. He believes he saw Kolatkar smile. Sohoni, at Kolatkar's behest, had done some photography for the cover of The Boatride and he showed him the pictures. They were shots of boats at the Gateway of India:

where the sea jostles against the wall vacuous sailboats snuggle tall and gawky Death of a Poet 110 Partial Recall their masts at variance A second folder contained his translations from Marathi, six of islam which I had not seen before, 'Malkhamb', 'Buildings', and the four mary 'Hospital Poems'. In a note given on the same sheet as the poem, dolphin Kolatkar says that 'malkhamb' 'means, literally, "a wrestler's pole". 1t'~a smooth, wooden, vertical pole buried in the gound. A com- their names appearing music mon feature found in all Indian gyms. Used by wrestlers in training and by gymnasts to display their skill.' Remembering his ('the boat ride') boyhood in Kolhapur, Kolatkar said that he used to be quite good Kolatkar looked at the photographs but didn't say anything. Then at the malkhamb. Ashok Shahane asked him something to which he replied that The 'Hospital Poems' were not a typescript but a photocopy they could discuss it once he aeturned to Bombay. It was the from a magazine and I asked him where they'd been published. He last thing he said this side of silence. He died two days later, said 'Santan'. I wondered what he meant and Adil helped me out. around midnight. He said that the poems had appeared in Santan Rodriguez's magazine Kavi, which had brought out a special Kolatkar number in 1978. Referring to 'The Turnaround', Kolatkar said that the book in which he'd looked for the English equivalent of vishnukranta was in the accordion file. 'It has a description of the flower', he said. I hadn't had a chance to explore the file but did so now and found Flowers of the Sahayadri (2001) by Shrikant Ingalhalikar in one of the pockets. 'Your work is in good hands', Adil said to Kolatkar, and repeated the sentence. He believes he saw Kolatkar smile. Sohoni, at Kolatkar's behest, had done some photography for the cover of The Boatride and he showed him the pictures. They were shots of boats at the Gateway of India:

where the sea jostles against the wall vacuous sailboats snuggle tall and gawky of toys from previous Diwali melas. Seen together, the toys make a city of clay, a clay city that is overcrowded and bursting at the seams. Here you will find a motor car, colourfully painted; a pair of street lights, one with its light smashed; four loudspeakers fixed on a pole; a vase with two green leaves and two pink flowers; a battle tank in camouflage colours and a piece of stiff wire for cannon; a woman carrying two pots, one on her head and the other tucked under her arm; a coiled snake whose springy hood City of Clay goes back and forth when tapped; a cock with a red cockscomb; He has a handlebar moustache, side-parted hair, and is dressed in a blue-winged fairy with a parrot sitting on her shoulder; a school- a shiny black suit. She wears a pleated pink skirt with matching boy, neatly dressed; a caparisoned horse; an old man with white blouse. They have red tikas on their foreheads and look newly cotton wool stuck on his chin; a traffic policeman, the position of married. From their features, they look Bengali. Standing against his arms making him look like a Bharatanatyam dancer; a tiger on a Honda motorcycle, they are staring at me when it ought to be the prowl; a tiger resting, as though after a meal; a six-member the other way round. I should be staring at them, which I am, brass band in green uniform; and a prison which I was told is Naini because his left hand is nowhere near where you expect it to be Tail. But as in a real city, there is room on the trunk, despite the but cupping her right breast. overcrowding, for one more family. With a little shifting around, This is Diwali time. With crowds of shoppers at every stall, it between the cock with the red cockscomb and the fairy with blue is not easy to catch the toy-seller's eye. When at last I do, I point wings, I accommodate the motorcycle couple. out the motorcycle couple and ask the price. Twelve rupees, he says, then goes back to attend to the other customers, one ofwhom Allahabad Live is bargaining for a clay weightlifter and the other for clay images of Ganesh and Lakshmi. It's a while before I'm able to catch his Ever since I was 17 years old, I've harboured the illusion that I do eye again and pay for the toy, which his wife hands over to me, not live in Uttar I'radesh but New York, and to keep the illusion wrapped in a piece of newspaper. from shattering, instead of the local rag, I've always subscribed to The trunk in the living room, its tin painted brown to make it a Delhi paper. Delivered a day late and useless as news, I read it to look1ikewood, is stuffed with quilts, blankets, woollens, mosquito keep myself abreast of cultural events in the nation's capital, like nets, and armv surplus kitbags. Going by the stencilled markings the film show at the Hungarian Centre or the exhibition at Art on them, some of the bags are of World War I1 vintage; some of Heritage. But two years ago, after avisit to my GP, all this changed. the woollens, like my grandfather's achkan, go back to the Great The GP fancies himself as a wildlife photographer, and when- War. Kept on the trunk, in no particular order, is an assortment ever I've gone to him he's given me the impression that he'd rather of toys from previous Diwali melas. Seen together, the toys make a city of clay, a clay city that is overcrowded and bursting at the seams. Here you will find a motor car, colourfully painted; a pair of street lights, one with its light smashed; four loudspeakers fixed on a pole; a vase with two green leaves and two pink flowers; a battle tank in camouflage colours and a piece of stiff wire for cannon; a woman carrying two pots, one on her head and the other tucked under her arm; a coiled snake whose springy hood City of Clay goes back and forth when tapped; a cock with a red cockscomb; He has a handlebar moustache, side-parted hair, and is dressed in a blue-winged fairy with a parrot sitting on her shoulder; a school- a shiny black suit. She wears a pleated pink skirt with matching boy, neatly dressed; a caparisoned horse; an old man with white blouse. They have red tikas on their foreheads and look newly cotton wool stuck on his chin; a traffic policeman, the position of married. From their features, they look Bengali. Standing against his arms making him look like a Bharatanatyam dancer; a tiger on a Honda motorcycle, they are staring at me when it ought to be the prowl; a tiger resting, as though after a meal; a six-member the other way round. I should be staring at them, which I am, brass band in green uniform; and a prison which I was told is Naini because his left hand is nowhere near where you expect it to be Tail. But as in a real city, there is room on the trunk, despite the but cupping her right breast. overcrowding, for one more family. With a little shifting around, This is Diwali time. With crowds of shoppers at every stall, it between the cock with the red cockscomb and the fairy with blue is not easy to catch the toy-seller's eye. When at last I do, I point wings, I accommodate the motorcycle couple. out the motorcycle couple and ask the price. Twelve rupees, he says, then goes back to attend to the other customers, one ofwhom Allahabad Live is bargaining for a clay weightlifter and the other for clay images of Ganesh and Lakshmi. It's a while before I'm able to catch his Ever since I was 17 years old, I've harboured the illusion that I do eye again and pay for the toy, which his wife hands over to me, not live in Uttar I'radesh but New York, and to keep the illusion wrapped in a piece of newspaper. from shattering, instead of the local rag, I've always subscribed to The trunk in the living room, its tin painted brown to make it a Delhi paper. Delivered a day late and useless as news, I read it to look1ikewood, is stuffed with quilts, blankets, woollens, mosquito keep myself abreast of cultural events in the nation's capital, like nets, and armv surplus kitbags. Going by the stencilled markings the film show at the Hungarian Centre or the exhibition at Art on them, some of the bags are of World War I1 vintage; some of Heritage. But two years ago, after avisit to my GP, all this changed. the woollens, like my grandfather's achkan, go back to the Great The GP fancies himself as a wildlife photographer, and when- War. Kept on the trunk, in no particular order, is an assortment ever I've gone to him he's given me the impression that he'd rather 114 Partial Recall talk about the elephant or antelope herd he's put up on the clinic powerless against the sea, would catch me unawares. Rudely wall than about any ailment I might have. On this occasion shaken out of sleep, I would stay awake until daybreak, pacing the though, seeing me come in, even before I could sit down on the small bedroom as though I were an animal in a cage, all the while revolving stool next to his revolving chair and fake my interest in composing in my head a lengthy petition to the senior superin- his expensive hobby, he threw up his hands and gave me the news tendent of police, with a copy marked to the President of India, that Allahabad was in the grip ofaJE epidemic. The nursing home complaining about the loudspeaker menace. But not any more, he was attached to was full up, he said, and he had been advis- not since I changed my newspaper and started to get, through the ing his patients who needed hc-spitalization to go to the district local rag, advance news of the annual musical onslaught. With a hospital or the medical college. Many of the patients were from supply of sleeping pills and cotton wool by my side, I was now Rajapur, an area close to where I live. ready to take on the mela, just as I was the no less fatal JE epidemic. 'JE?' asked. I Muir Road is a long straight road, one stretch of which passes 'Japanese encephalitis. It's the only story in the papers these through Rajapur, where the mela is held. Rajapur used to be a days. Don't you read them?' working-class area, supplying the neighbourhood with domestics, The charade of living not in Allahabad but New York (or even carpenters, plumbers, masons, house painters, and electricians, Delhi), realized, had to end, and it had to endvery soon if didn't I I and most of it still is. To its south are narrow lanes, paved with want it to cost me my life. The next day changed my paper; I I brick. They branch off the main road and end in the kacbchar, started to read Live. Allababad rich alluvial land bordering the Ganges where watermelons are Along with reports of murders, dacoities, and the latest epide- grown in summer. To its north is Rajapur Cemetery, which has Live mic, Allahabad gives you the reminiscences of distinguished existed since colonial times. There isn't a single 'wine shop' in local octogenarians ('When Indira Gandhi chastised a Congress Rajapur, but right by the popular Hanuman temple, the dado of leader') and on page under 'Around Town', information on 3, whose interior wall is faced with white bathroom tiles, the old birthday celebrations ('Habib Tanvir's birthday celebrated'), yoga country liquor bar still flourishes. camps ('Yoga training camp organized'), probes urged to ('CM It was getting towards noon and too hot to walk. Arriving there order probe'), meets ('Women astrologers meet today'), and melas on my bicycle, I saw on either side ofthe road, at a distance ofevery ('Dadhikando mela'). few metres, wooden poles fixed into the ground. Between the not need 'Around Town' to tell me about Dadhikando. 1 did poles were stretched three strings of fairy lights, one below the Year after year, the mela was brought live to me at night, when other and each of a different colour, yellow, red, and green. Be- hundreds of loudspeakers played Bollywood music at full blast. tween the first string of fairy lights and the second were lights in The music would pound the air, as though the air were the the shape of a heart. To the left and to the right of thc heart were coast and the music the sea at high tide. The relentless pounding, more lights, diamond-shaped. The heart lights were red and, against which one was powerless in the same way that one is compared with the mini bulbs used in the strings, their bulbs were 114 Partial Recall talk about the elephant or antelope herd he's put up on the clinic powerless against the sea, would catch me unawares. Rudely wall than about any ailment I might have. On this occasion shaken out of sleep, I would stay awake until daybreak, pacing the though, seeing me come in, even before I could sit down on the small bedroom as though I were an animal in a cage, all the while revolving stool next to his revolving chair and fake my interest in composing in my head a lengthy petition to the senior superin- his expensive hobby, he threw up his hands and gave me the news tendent of police, with a copy marked to the President of India, that Allahabad was in the grip ofaJE epidemic. The nursing home complaining about the loudspeaker menace. But not any more, he was attached to was full up, he said, and he had been advis- not since I changed my newspaper and started to get, through the ing his patients who needed hc-spitalization to go to the district local rag, advance news of the annual musical onslaught. With a hospital or the medical college. Many of the patients were from supply of sleeping pills and cotton wool by my side, I was now Rajapur, an area close to where I live. ready to take on the mela, just as I was the no less fatal JE epidemic. 'JE?' asked. I Muir Road is a long straight road, one stretch of which passes 'Japanese encephalitis. It's the only story in the papers these through Rajapur, where the mela is held. Rajapur used to be a days. Don't you read them?' working-class area, supplying the neighbourhood with domestics, The charade of living not in Allahabad but New York (or even carpenters, plumbers, masons, house painters, and electricians, Delhi), realized, had to end, and it had to endvery soon if didn't I I and most of it still is. To its south are narrow lanes, paved with want it to cost me my life. The next day changed my paper; I I brick. They branch off the main road and end in the kacbchar, started to read Live. Allababad rich alluvial land bordering the Ganges where watermelons are Along with reports of murders, dacoities, and the latest epide- grown in summer. To its north is Rajapur Cemetery, which has Live mic, Allahabad gives you the reminiscences of distinguished existed since colonial times. There isn't a single 'wine shop' in local octogenarians ('When Indira Gandhi chastised a Congress Rajapur, but right by the popular Hanuman temple, the dado of leader') and on page under 'Around Town', information on 3, whose interior wall is faced with white bathroom tiles, the old birthday celebrations ('Habib Tanvir's birthday celebrated'), yoga country liquor bar still flourishes. camps ('Yoga training camp organized'), probes urged to ('CM It was getting towards noon and too hot to walk. Arriving there order probe'), meets ('Women astrologers meet today'), and melas on my bicycle, I saw on either side ofthe road, at a distance ofevery ('Dadhikando mela'). few metres, wooden poles fixed into the ground. Between the not need 'Around Town' to tell me about Dadhikando. 1 did poles were stretched three strings of fairy lights, one below the Year after year, the mela was brought live to me at night, when other and each of a different colour, yellow, red, and green. Be- hundreds of loudspeakers played Bollywood music at full blast. tween the first string of fairy lights and the second were lights in The music would pound the air, as though the air were the the shape of a heart. To the left and to the right of thc heart were coast and the music the sea at high tide. The relentless pounding, more lights, diamond-shaped. The heart lights were red and, against which one was powerless in the same way that one is compared with the mini bulbs used in the strings, their bulbs were 116 Partial Recall of a bigger diameter. The diamond shapes had lights of a deep roadside paan shop. There was a man sitting on the packing-case. yellow colour. The electricians installing the lights were young He was Bankey Lal; profession: plumber. The packing-case was lads in trousers and body-hugging singlets. With pliers in their his office. I said I was a journalist, and, for want of anything better hands and rubber flip-flops on their feet, their dark skin glistening to say, I showed off my knowledge of toilet cisterns. I told him that with sweat, they moved from pole to pole on wooden stepladders I repaired my own. He probably thought that I was off my head placed on bicycle-trolleys, making sure that when the lights were but offered to help all the same. switched on every one of them twinkled. 'Pradeep Srivastava is not going to be at home', Bankey La1 On the pavement, wherever room could be found, makeshift said. 'Not today, when all the mela organizers are out collecting open .stalls had sprung up. A length of nylon cord tied to a metal funds. But I can show you where he lives. You may have to come railing served as the poster stall. Posters hung from the cord, back later.' attached to it with clothes pegs. One of the posters said 'Everyone We hadn't gone very far wheu he pointed to a short, thickset loves me'. It showed five golden-haired toddlers playing with man with a small paunch standing outside a paint shop. plastic toys and learning blocks. Another said 'Welcome' in big 'That's him', Bankey La1 said. I wanted to thank him for escort- letters. Tired-looking men and women sat on the pavement, ing me but before I could do so he had vanished and probably under a fierce sun, their goods covered with grimy plastic sheets. returned to his perch on the packing-case. They did not need to set up stalls, even makeshift ones, and Srivastava was the secretary of the Dadhikando Samiti, and, were only waiting for the sun to set to unpack the goods. These like several other Samiti members, he was an advocate. He said he they would spread out on the ground, on the same sheet that was was still busy with the arrangements and had many things to covering them. They were all waiting for the mela to begin. attend to, but seemed eager to talk all the same. Week after week, the forecast had said 'thundery weather' but 'Though Dadhikando melas are also held at other places in the sky had remained clear. The monsoon had failed once again. Allahabad', he said, 'they are nothing compared with the show we As I bicycled down Muir Road, the air on the skin felt like flames. put up in Rajapur. Our light decoration extends for two kilo- Men, both young and old, sat on the front steps ofhouses, fanning metres, the longest of any mela in Allahabad, and we draw the themselves with anything that came to hand, an envelope, a biggest crowds. The float parade will start after midnight. If you piece of cardboard, a newspaper, a handkerchief. I was looking for come around nine you'll be able to see one of the floats parked a place with some shade, where I could stop awhile and find right here, outside the shop. Allahabad's Dusshera is famous all out where the 'office-bearers' of the Shree Krishna Dadhikando over India and it is time its Dadhikando became famous too. Last Samiti, Rajapur, lived. Their names, followed by their profession year a TV channel from Lucknow covered us in the news.' if they were advocates, had appeared in 'AroundTown'. But places I asked him if he knew how old the mela was. with shade are hard to find in Rajapur. When I finally stopped, it 'It's very old and goes back to British times. I have papers at wasn't under a tree but in front of a packing-case kept beside a home to prove this. Do you want to see them?' 116 Partial Recall of a bigger diameter. The diamond shapes had lights of a deep roadside paan shop. There was a man sitting on the packing-case. yellow colour. The electricians installing the lights were young He was Bankey Lal; profession: plumber. The packing-case was lads in trousers and body-hugging singlets. With pliers in their his office. I said I was a journalist, and, for want of anything better hands and rubber flip-flops on their feet, their dark skin glistening to say, I showed off my knowledge of toilet cisterns. I told him that with sweat, they moved from pole to pole on wooden stepladders I repaired my own. He probably thought that I was off my head placed on bicycle-trolleys, making sure that when the lights were but offered to help all the same. switched on every one of them twinkled. 'Pradeep Srivastava is not going to be at home', Bankey La1 On the pavement, wherever room could be found, makeshift said. 'Not today, when all the mela organizers are out collecting open .stalls had sprung up. A length of nylon cord tied to a metal funds. But I can show you where he lives. You may have to come railing served as the poster stall. Posters hung from the cord, back later.' attached to it with clothes pegs. One of the posters said 'Everyone We hadn't gone very far wheu he pointed to a short, thickset loves me'. It showed five golden-haired toddlers playing with man with a small paunch standing outside a paint shop. plastic toys and learning blocks. Another said 'Welcome' in big 'That's him', Bankey La1 said. I wanted to thank him for escort- letters. Tired-looking men and women sat on the pavement, ing me but before I could do so he had vanished and probably under a fierce sun, their goods covered with grimy plastic sheets. returned to his perch on the packing-case. They did not need to set up stalls, even makeshift ones, and Srivastava was the secretary of the Dadhikando Samiti, and, were only waiting for the sun to set to unpack the goods. These like several other Samiti members, he was an advocate. He said he they would spread out on the ground, on the same sheet that was was still busy with the arrangements and had many things to covering them. They were all waiting for the mela to begin. attend to, but seemed eager to talk all the same. Week after week, the forecast had said 'thundery weather' but 'Though Dadhikando melas are also held at other places in the sky had remained clear. The monsoon had failed once again. Allahabad', he said, 'they are nothing compared with the show we As I bicycled down Muir Road, the air on the skin felt like flames. put up in Rajapur. Our light decoration extends for two kilo- Men, both young and old, sat on the front steps ofhouses, fanning metres, the longest of any mela in Allahabad, and we draw the themselves with anything that came to hand, an envelope, a biggest crowds. The float parade will start after midnight. If you piece of cardboard, a newspaper, a handkerchief. I was looking for come around nine you'll be able to see one of the floats parked a place with some shade, where I could stop awhile and find right here, outside the shop. Allahabad's Dusshera is famous all out where the 'office-bearers' of the Shree Krishna Dadhikando over India and it is time its Dadhikando became famous too. Last Samiti, Rajapur, lived. Their names, followed by their profession year a TV channel from Lucknow covered us in the news.' if they were advocates, had appeared in 'AroundTown'. But places I asked him if he knew how old the mela was. with shade are hard to find in Rajapur. When I finally stopped, it 'It's very old and goes back to British times. I have papers at wasn't under a tree but in front of a packing-case kept beside a home to prove this. Do you want to see them?' 118 Partial Recall

He gave me his telephone number and sped offin the direction women and children, sometimes accompanied by a husband or of Sadar Bazaar on his scooter. I thought I would call him but brother, gathered around stalls selling traditional mela goods: never did. plastic xylophones and rattles, toy kitchen sets and doctor sets, Before leaving, Srivastava had introduced me to the owner of baba suits, glass bangles, powders and fairness creams that faked the paint shop. A busy-looking man in his mid twenties, he was popular brands. Lodged between the stalls were food and ice also the person who had put up the money for the float that cream carts. I stopped by a tattooist and watched him at work. Srivastava wanted me to see. We shook hands but he did not tell He sat on the pavement, a sheet ofhandmade paper in front of me his name and nor did I ask. him. On the sheet, meticulously drawn in black ink, were rows He said, 'Dadhikando celebrates the childhood ofLord Krishna of motifs, each motif repeated several times: a half moon, a half and everyone participates in it. Even the poorest man will make moon and cross, a coiled snake, a swastika, a flower vase with a a donation. If the city's been spared natural disasters and epi- single flower, an OM sign, a da'ger, three dots arranged in the demics, it's because the people here are deeply religious.' form of a triangle, a lotus, a peacock, a scorpion, a turtle, Hanu- A delivery van carrying Berger Paints drew alongside. He went man, a heart with an arrow through it and the word dil written up to the driver and signed a piece ofpaper that the driver handed in Hindi, and another with dil written in English. Hidden away him. He then called out to his shop assistant to unload the cans in a rectangular tin box, the size of a biscuit tin, were the instru- of paint. ments of torture. Paint wasn't the only thing being unloaded in Kajapur that A young man wanted his name tattooed. From his close- afternoon. Bicycling back, I saw loudspeakers being unloaded cropped hair and strong physique he looked like an army cadet, too. Big conical loudspeakers, the name of the loudspeaker com- - and very likely was one. He asked how much the tattoo would pany stencilled along the rim, were stacked beside every lamppost cost. Two rupees for every letter of the Hindi alphabet and double I passed. that for English, he was told. He had one other question: would In the evening, Muir Road looked like fairyland. The lights on it hurt? 'About as much as an ant bite', said the tattooist. either side ofthe road faded and flashed, and for the first time I saw The young man sat down on his haunches and stretched out that there were strings of lights above as well. These were chasing his arm in front of him, the fist closed. He had a broad forearm, lights, placed ten inches apart, forming a kind of low canopy. The with space on it for a lot more tattoos than just his name. The loudspeakers played Bollywood hits, but the music wasn't ear- tattooist wet a piece of rag with what certainly wasn't denatured splitting yet. A sound like that of twenty motor cars, their engines spirit and cleaned a small area ofthe skin. He then took out a small rewed up, came from the light controllers, one of them installed battery-operated drill from the tin box. Two wires connected the near the Hanuman temple. Bunches of thin electrical wires drill to the batteries. After dipping the bit into a bottle filled with connected the controllers to the lights, making them flash or tattoo ink, he gently ~ressedit into the skin. The man winced for fade or give the chasing effect. Dressed in their best clothes, a second and watched the letter R form before his eyes. The letter 120 Partial Recall was still wet and smudgy when the tattooist lifted the drill and The tarpaulin flaps are buttoned down wrote out the next letter, A, and then the third, M. The three on the windows of the state transport bus all the way up to Jejuri. indistinct letters ran into each other and the tattooist wiped them with the same rag. The letters now looked bright and clean, as A cold wind keeps whipping though a computer had printed them. and slapping a corner of the tarpaulin It was past nine and there was still no sign of the float. I made at your elbow. enquiries at the paint shop but the owner I had spoken to earlier You look down the roaring road. was not there and the others didn't seem to know. I started to make You search for signs of daybreak in my way home. At the Hanuman temple was a TV cameraman, what little light spills out of the bus. standing very still in the middle of Muir Road, shooting the ('The .Bus') crowds streaming past and the twinkling fairy lights. After 'a bumpy ride' when 'all the countryside you get to see' is 'Your own divided face in a pair of on an old man's nose', Jejuri-Bandra-Jejuri the bus comes to a halt 'in front of the priest' who has been On a visit to Pune in September 2004 to see Arun Kolatkar, who patiently waiting for it all morning. And this is why: 'purring had been seriously ill and who died that week, I read in the Times softly1,the bus has of India a report on the changing face of Jejuri. Until then, A catgrin on its face although I knew that Jejuri was a town in western Maharashtra, and a live, ready to eat pilgrim I had not seen it in this way. For me, as for many others, it had \ held between its teeth. always been associated with a book by that name. It came as a ('The Priest') shock, then, to read that Jejuri also existed outside the imagination of its readers, that it was like any other place on the map, with Only incidentally is Jejuri about a temple town or matters of ordinary people walking about its ordinary streets and living their faith. At its heart, and at the heart of all of Kolatkar's work, lies a day-to-day lives. This 'real'Jejuri, which city newspapers reported moral vision, whose basis is the things of this world, precisely, on and information technology was transforming, had seemed rapturously observed. So, a common doorstep is revealed to be a unreal and abstract to me at the time; it still does. pillar on its side, Yes./ That's what it is'; the eight-arm-goddess, The main attraction of Jejuri is the temple dedicated to Khan- once you begin to count, has eighteen arms; and the rundown doba, a folk god popular with the nomadic and pastoral commu- Maruti temple, where nobody comes to worship but is home to nities of Maharashtra and north Karnataka. Arun Kolatkar's a mongrel bitch and her puppies, is, for that reason, 'nothing jejuri is a record of a visit to the town. Here are the opening less than the house of god.' The matter-of-fact tone is easy to get verses: wrong, and Kolatkar's Marathi critics got it badly wrong, finding 120 Partial Recall was still wet and smudgy when the tattooist lifted the drill and The tarpaulin flaps are buttoned down wrote out the next letter, A, and then the third, M. The three on the windows of the state transport bus all the way up to Jejuri. indistinct letters ran into each other and the tattooist wiped them with the same rag. The letters now looked bright and clean, as A cold wind keeps whipping though a computer had printed them. and slapping a corner of the tarpaulin It was past nine and there was still no sign of the float. I made at your elbow. enquiries at the paint shop but the owner I had spoken to earlier You look down the roaring road. was not there and the others didn't seem to know. I started to make You search for signs of daybreak in my way home. At the Hanuman temple was a TV cameraman, what little light spills out of the bus. standing very still in the middle of Muir Road, shooting the ('The .Bus') crowds streaming past and the twinkling fairy lights. After 'a bumpy ride' when 'all the countryside you get to see' is 'Your own divided face in a pair of on an old man's nose', Jejuri-Bandra-Jejuri the bus comes to a halt 'in front of the priest' who has been On a visit to Pune in September 2004 to see Arun Kolatkar, who patiently waiting for it all morning. And this is why: 'purring had been seriously ill and who died that week, I read in the Times softly1,the bus has of India a report on the changing face of Jejuri. Until then, A catgrin on its face although I knew that Jejuri was a town in western Maharashtra, and a live, ready to eat pilgrim I had not seen it in this way. For me, as for many others, it had \ held between its teeth. always been associated with a book by that name. It came as a ('The Priest') shock, then, to read that Jejuri also existed outside the imagination of its readers, that it was like any other place on the map, with Only incidentally is Jejuri about a temple town or matters of ordinary people walking about its ordinary streets and living their faith. At its heart, and at the heart of all of Kolatkar's work, lies a day-to-day lives. This 'real'Jejuri, which city newspapers reported moral vision, whose basis is the things of this world, precisely, on and information technology was transforming, had seemed rapturously observed. So, a common doorstep is revealed to be a unreal and abstract to me at the time; it still does. pillar on its side, Yes./ That's what it is'; the eight-arm-goddess, The main attraction of Jejuri is the temple dedicated to Khan- once you begin to count, has eighteen arms; and the rundown doba, a folk god popular with the nomadic and pastoral commu- Maruti temple, where nobody comes to worship but is home to nities of Maharashtra and north Karnataka. Arun Kolatkar's a mongrel bitch and her puppies, is, for that reason, 'nothing jejuri is a record of a visit to the town. Here are the opening less than the house of god.' The matter-of-fact tone is easy to get verses: wrong, and Kolatkar's Marathi critics got it badly wrong, finding 122 Partial Recall it to be cold, flippant, at best sceptical. They were forgetting, of models of dentures, hands, arms, legs, eyes, and breasts. Also on course, that the clarity of Kolatkar's observations would not be sale were wax-covered photocopies of hundred-rupee banknotes possible without abundant sympathy for the person or animal (or and a wax sheet with a row oftiny protuberances down the middle, even inanimate object) being observed; forgetting, too, that which I could not immediately identify. It was a model of the without abundant sympathy for what was being observed the spine and the tiny protuberances were the cartilage discs. poems would not be the acts of attention they are. The last poem Themodels corresponded to specific boons the pilgrims sought. in the book is 'The Railway Station'. In it, from the stationmaster For the childless was the doll; for those who wanted money, the to 'the young novice at the tea stall', no one is prepared to tell the banknote; for those anxious to own property, the house; for those narrator 'when the next train is due'. The book had opened with who wished to avoid a trip to the dentist, the set of teeth; and for daybreak; it closes with sunset: those looking for relief from back pain, the spine. It had started to drizzle. The pilgrims contin'ued to arrive, unmindful of the the setting sun rain that was now falling steadily. They stood around the stalls, large as a wheel made their purchase, and continued on their way to Mount Mary. Apart from a 'young woman' who arranges 'A Little Pile of I hesitated for a bit, then crossed the road to join the stream of ' Stones' in the belief that if the pile does not topple over she will people who had lit their candles and made their offerings and have a long and happily married life and a 'teen age bride on her were now headed in the opposite direction, towards Bandra knees' who performs a ritual under the watchful eyes of a smiling Station. But before doing so I bought, out of an old collecting priest, ready-to-eat pilgrims are absent from Jejuri. The opposite habit, a banknote and a few body parts. was true on the day I visited the Bandra Fair in Bombay. Held Our Blessed Virgin's counterpart in Jejuri is Yeshwant Rao. every September for one week to coincide with the feast that Called 'only a second class god', he is not much to look at: follows the nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I had gone there Yeshwant Rao, on the evening of the last day, which explained the rush of pil- mass of basalt, grims on the roads that led to Mount Mary Church. The BEST bright as any post box, bus I was in kept getting stuck in the traffic and it seemed quicker the shape of protoplasm to walk the rest of the way. The crowd that had looked like a mass or a king size lava pie thrown against the wall, of slow-moving ants from my window seat in the upper deck felt without an arm, a leg more like a swiftly flowing river once I was part of it. Stalls lined or even a single head. the pavement, and I had to push hard against the current to get to them. They were selling candles and what, to me, looked like toys: While he cannot 'double your money', 'triple your land hold- motor cars, houses, doll-like figures, all made of wax. Some of ings', or 'put a child inside your wife', in some things the 'mass of the toys, unlike any other toys I'd seen, were body parts: wax basalt' is as effective as Our Lady of the Mount: 122 Partial Recall it to be cold, flippant, at best sceptical. They were forgetting, of models of dentures, hands, arms, legs, eyes, and breasts. Also on course, that the clarity of Kolatkar's observations would not be sale were wax-covered photocopies of hundred-rupee banknotes possible without abundant sympathy for the person or animal (or and a wax sheet with a row oftiny protuberances down the middle, even inanimate object) being observed; forgetting, too, that which I could not immediately identify. It was a model of the without abundant sympathy for what was being observed the spine and the tiny protuberances were the cartilage discs. poems would not be the acts of attention they are. The last poem Themodels corresponded to specific boons the pilgrims sought. in the book is 'The Railway Station'. In it, from the stationmaster For the childless was the doll; for those who wanted money, the to 'the young novice at the tea stall', no one is prepared to tell the banknote; for those anxious to own property, the house; for those narrator 'when the next train is due'. The book had opened with who wished to avoid a trip to the dentist, the set of teeth; and for daybreak; it closes with sunset: those looking for relief from back pain, the spine. It had started to drizzle. The pilgrims contin'ued to arrive, unmindful of the the setting sun rain that was now falling steadily. They stood around the stalls, large as a wheel made their purchase, and continued on their way to Mount Mary. Apart from a 'young woman' who arranges 'A Little Pile of I hesitated for a bit, then crossed the road to join the stream of ' Stones' in the belief that if the pile does not topple over she will people who had lit their candles and made their offerings and have a long and happily married life and a 'teen age bride on her were now headed in the opposite direction, towards Bandra knees' who performs a ritual under the watchful eyes of a smiling Station. But before doing so I bought, out of an old collecting priest, ready-to-eat pilgrims are absent from Jejuri. The opposite habit, a banknote and a few body parts. was true on the day I visited the Bandra Fair in Bombay. Held Our Blessed Virgin's counterpart in Jejuri is Yeshwant Rao. every September for one week to coincide with the feast that Called 'only a second class god', he is not much to look at: follows the nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I had gone there Yeshwant Rao, on the evening of the last day, which explained the rush of pil- mass of basalt, grims on the roads that led to Mount Mary Church. The BEST bright as any post box, bus I was in kept getting stuck in the traffic and it seemed quicker the shape of protoplasm to walk the rest of the way. The crowd that had looked like a mass or a king size lava pie thrown against the wall, of slow-moving ants from my window seat in the upper deck felt without an arm, a leg more like a swiftly flowing river once I was part of it. Stalls lined or even a single head. the pavement, and I had to push hard against the current to get to them. They were selling candles and what, to me, looked like toys: While he cannot 'double your money', 'triple your land hold- motor cars, houses, doll-like figures, all made of wax. Some of ings', or 'put a child inside your wife', in some things the 'mass of the toys, unlike any other toys I'd seen, were body parts: wax basalt' is as effective as Our Lady of the Mount: 124 Partial Recall

Yeshwant Rao. perhaps because it was three in the afternoon and everyone was He's the god you've got to meet. taking their siesta, the roads had little traffic. The only time the If you're short of a limb, rickshaw I was travelling in slowed down was when it neared its Yeshwant Rao will lend you a hand and ger youback on your feet. destination, and then too because of the condition of the road, which was full ofcrater-sized potholes when it was there at all. On In Dilip Chitre's short film on Kolatkar, made for the Sahitya either side were cowsheds, and, each time I passed what looked Akademi in 2004, there are shots of Jejuri, including one of like a house, it had acow or calftied to a stake outside. Occasionally, Yeshwant Rao. He looks exactly as Kolatkar has described him, a an advocate's nameplate was tackedon adoor, the letters indistinct rock 'the shape of protoplasm' and daubed with red paint. and the door paint peeling. Behind the door, which was firmly Another shot shows the replicas of the limbs-a crudely made shut, it seemed unlikely that any human activity, let alone legal arm, a leg-that the pilgrims have offered at the shrine. Fittingly activity, took place. A rusted metal sign advertising a PC0 tilted for a god in rural Maharashtra, the replicas are life-size and towards the road, and, while a grunting pig ran alongside the fashioned from wood. rickshaw before finally overtaking it, the rickshaw swerved to avoid another pothole. A girl stood in a doorway, a thick science Stone Carvers' Lane textbook in her hand but her eyes focused elsewhere; a woman A friend tells me about the Kartik Mela at Baluaghat. Situated on sat by an open drain, weaving a basket. As the afternoon light the Jamuna, Baluaghat is about five kilometres, or thirty minutes weakened and the gold turned to a pale yellow, I wondered why by rickshaw, from where I live. Having spent my life in those parts I was making this trip to Baluaghat. ofAllahabad from where the Ganges was never more than a short It came to me then, as it had earlier too, that the urban face of walk away, going to Baluaghat was a bit like going to a foreign Allahabad, created during colonial times, was only a mask. The country. But a foreign country, as I knew only too well, that in the wide roads, the crenellated houses, the gravelled drives, were as a end would turn out to be a mirror image of the native one. piece of theatre on which the curtain had long been rung. In the Located in the old part of town, to get there from Civil Lines sixty years since Independence, most of the buildings of the Raj involved negotiating the lanes of Johnstonganj and Bansmandi, had collapsed through age or neglect or had been torn down, and, the ldtter a specialized bazaar dealing in all things related to wood, as the stones of empire turned to dust, they laid bare Allahabad's from sawn logs, planks, and boards to dowry furniture (armchairs essentially rural features. This unpleasant fact, I realized, I had and sofa sets upholstered in printed velvet, chaise-longues, dining concealed from myselfby surrounding myselfwith a large number tables with Formica tops). There is never a time ofyear when Bans- of books and a handful offriends, all ofwhom lived in other cities. mandi is not crowded, and since I'd decided to make the trip In one of these books, which I had taken down from my shelves on the day before Diwali, which also happened to be the last at random, I once came across a passage which I had been looking Friday of Ramadan, I expected it to be even more so. Surprisingly, for without knowing that I was looking for it. It put in perspective 124 Partial Recall

what I now saw around me. 'The life of the dynasty is the life of to an elderly man, who was wearing a lungi and vest and busy the town', wrote the great fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn talking to someone. Khaldun in The Muqaddimah. 'If the dynasty is of short dura- 'Could you help me with the names of these gods?' I asked him. tion, life in the town will stop at the end of the dynasty. Its 'Which one do you want to buy?' civilization will recede, and the town will fall into ruins.' Nirad C. 'Well actually I just wanted to . . .' Chaudhuri's oft-quoted dedication in An Autobiography of an I had not completed the sentence when he turned his back Unknown Indian- 'All that was good and living/ within us/ was and resumed the conversation I had interrupted. Clearly, Balua- made, shaped, and quickened' by British rule-if applied less to ghat was not the place to come to ifyou wanted a quick lesson in the subject population and more to ci'ties like Allahabad, con- Hindu iconography. ceals an important truth. A few steps away was a stall selling clay toys. After my en- The unofficial name of the road leading from the Baluaghat counter with the idols, or mort precisely with the idol seller, I crossing to the Jamuna is Patthar wali galli, or Stone Carvers' turned to the toys with a sense of relief, knowing that I was on Lane. This is where the mela is supposed to be held, but except for home territory here, that the toys would not show up my ignorance a few stalls selling cheap crockery (cups and saucers, mugs, dinner in the same way that the gods had. The stall, arranged in tiers, plates) or cheap plastic goods ('All items Rs. 51-'), there was no stepladder fashion, had all the usual mela favourites-motor cars, sign of the mela. For a moment I even wondered if I had come to flowerpots, hens, policemen, yogis, guavas-but then came some- the wrong place. Little by little, as a tourist might, I gathered that thing that, in all my years of mela going, I had not seen before, the mela proper, the one that I had come to see, would begin after something that left me completely stumped. This was a standing Diwali and continue for the next fourteen days, concluding on figure, about the height of a man's palm, with a pointed mouse- Kartik Purnima, when people in large numbers would take a ritual like face, coloured electric blue. Its slit eyes were outlined in red, bath in the Jamuna at Baluaghat, just as they would in rivers and with black eyelashes, and there was a triangular silvery mark on its tanks all across the country, in the Ganges in Haridwar, in the forehead. It wore a yellow gown with attached hood. The gown Mahanadi in Cuttack, in the Gandak in Sonepur, in Pushkar in covered it from head to toe, so that except for the hands, which Ajmer. This larger significance of Kartik Purnima I learned not were of the same electric blue colour as the face, no other part of by talking to the sullen stall keepers of Baluaghat but by googling the figure was visible. I asked the stall keeper what this strange the phrase later. object represented and he said it was an 'alien', using the English By the side ofthe road, at the head of Stone Carvers' Lane, stood word. I later learnt that the 'alien' was based on a character in a a row of idols. In front of them sat a young boy, chipping away Bollywood film starring Hrithik Roshan and Preity Zinta. at a fresh block, teasing out the figure in the grey stone. I could Stone Carvers' Lane ended at the river. With boats idling in the make out some of the gods-Hanuman, Ganesh, the more water, as if they were waiting for someone to arrive, it appeared to obvious ones-but not all. The goddesses particularly were difficult be an idyllic scene. It looked desolate as well, in the way idyllic to identify, and I sought the boy's help. He looked up and pointed scenes often do. 126 Partial Recall

At the bottom of the lane was a stone carver's shack, outside Speaking of Posters which sat a well-built young man covered in grey dust, gently tapping at a stone with a hammer and chisel. Once bitten, I Often, putting my eye to the peephole, if it's the courier, the hesitated before putting my question to him. milkman, the vegetable seller, or the dhobi who's rung the bell, I 'What are you carving?' find him studying the poster pasted on the front door. He's seen 'Jagadamba', he said, after a long silence, and then shot back a the poster before, on previous visits to the house, but still looks question of his own. at it as though he's seeing it for the first time. 'You from Allahabad?' Based on the Hindu belief that the dead, after departing from 'Yes. From near Rajapur, in Civil Lines.' this life, have to cross the Vaitarani, the shit-filled river of hell, 'It doesn't look so to me, not from your appearance.' the poster shows a young fair-complexioned woman, her eyes 'Well, Rajapur is a long way off from Baluaghat, which is chastely lowered, crossing the river, holding the tail of a cow. Also why people look different there.' in the water are two fire-breathing dragon-like creatures and a We continued in this fashion for a while. The conversation was drowning man. While the woman is reaping the rewards of good getting nowhere and I did not know how to extricate myself from karma-she may have, for instance, donated a cow to a Brahmin it. There were flat chisels and point chisels lying around and in her lifetime-the man suffers for lack of it. As the other panels I picked up a flat chisel, feeling the blade with my thumb. in the poster show, his ordeal, without a cow to pide him across 'Where do you get these from?' Shit River, has only just begun. 'Why do you want to know?' There is a story told by T.J. Clark about the Suprematist 'I'm interested in tools generally. You could say that I collect painter Kasimir Malevich and his model for a statue of Lenin: them.' Malevich who, like all other Bolshevik artists, has been working to 'We have our suppliers.The tools come mostly from Rajasthan.' express the greatness of Lenin in a model for his monument, proudly He continued to work on the stone, on one of Jagadamba's exhibited a huge pedestal composed of a mass of agricultural and four arms, as we talked. Stone dust filled the grooves and he industrial tools and machinery. On top of the pile was the 'figure' of removed it with a brush. For the first time I noticed that the idol Lenin-a simple cube without insignia. had paint on it, streaks ofyellow, red, and black. He was removing 'But where's Lenin?' the artist was asked. With an injured air he the paint bit by bit, by tapping the painted area with a chisel, pointed to the cube. Anybody could see that if they had a soul, he which he held at a thirty-degree angle to the stone. added. But the judges without hesitation turned down the work of art. There must be a real figure of Lenin, they reason, if the single- 'You're taking off the paint', I said. It was an unnecessary reminded peasant is to be inspired. mark and I regretted making it. 'I could even take the skin offyour flesh', he replied, giving the The bazaar artist who made the poster needed no Soviet judge to paint another tap. tell him about inspirational art or how best to get his message 130 Partial Recall across to 'the single-minded peasant'. Crudely drawn and brightly Ironically, these depicters and narrators ofhell punishments could coloured, the figures in the poster are 'real' in the way that comic- on occasion be thieves themselves. A tenth-century collection of book stereotypes are real. The carter who overloads the cart, the Jaina stories in Kannada tells of a picture-showman who was grocer who sells you short, the woman who goes for an abortion, hanged for stealing. While he kept his listeners enthralled by the cat burglar who breaks into your house, the profiteer who deals telling them punishment stories ([he horned demons and boil- in the black market, the butcher who sells meat are, in separate ing vats of my poster), other members of his gang made off with panels, shown committing the ill deed, the bad karma. The panels the bags of paddy belonging to paddy-merchants sitting in the below them show its terrible consequences. The offender is tied to audience. Until thirty years ago, according to Tyotindra Jain, a pole or stuffed in a vat, and as flames leap up from below a burly there existed in the oral tradition of the Garodas, a community of two-horned demon figure, spear in hand, disembowels him or, in picture-showmen in Gujarat, a description of a member of their the case of the abortionist, her. Some of the punishments are an profession: 'He moves around Gith a painted scroll. He wears a attempt at humour, ofthe rustic sort. The carter's punishment for sacred mark on his forehead and a turban on his head. On his overloading is that he is harnessed to a cart and made to do the shoulder he carries a bag and there is a stick in his hand.' work of the bullock. The load he is pulling is a smiling giant. Two The middle-aged man I had bought the poster from did not panels show the crimes of bribery and adultery. In these, both have a stick in his hand nor a turban on his head. He was wearing the bribe-giver and the bribe-taker, both the adulterer and the a shirt and trousers, and before giving me the poster had rolled it adulteress, are punished. Though her partner in crime is punished up and secured it with a rubber band. But he could have been a in the usual way, by being tied to a pole and disembowelled, the Garoda of Gujarat or a third-century Jaina mendicant, just as I adulteress is shown lying on the floor with a pole sticking out from could have been sitting in the attentive crowd, among the believers. her thighs. While she undergoes her torture, the two-horned devil My other mela poster, similarly printed on cheap paper and sticks out his long tongue at her. priced at one rupee, is a map. Though it saysTirthraj Prayag Map I had bought the poster at a local mela, as an example of modern in English and Tirthraj Prayag ka naksha in Hindi at the top, bazaar art, except that there was nothing modern about it. it's not a map in the traditional sense. On three sides, forming a Early Jaina literature of the third century CE has references to a border, are pictures ofgods, goddesses, and rishis: Vishnu, Shankar, 'mankha', a kind of mendicant 'whose hands were occupied by a Siddhanatha, Mahavira, Balmukunda, Lalita Devi, Gorakhnath, picture board'. Wherever a small crowd could be gathered, at a Kuber, Dharmaraj, Shesha, Markandeya,Vedavyas, Yama, Garuda, mela or shrine, you would find, among the fortune tellers, wrestl- Dattatreya, Bharadwaj, Kalabhairava, Narasimha, Satyanarayana, ers, acrobats, and mimes, a 'mankha' or more often a picture- and Rama, Lakshmana, and Sita. In the foreground are the rivers, showman, who, combining a display of gruesome visual images sky blue in colour, with tiny figures taking a holy dip, the bathers' with the art of storytelling, would tell his listeners about good heads no bigger than the letter 0. There are boats in the water, a karma and bad karma, about Shit River and the way across it. swimmer, and images of the river deities: 'Yamunaji' (sitting on a 130 Partial Recall across to 'the single-minded peasant'. Crudely drawn and brightly Ironically, these depicters and narrators ofhell punishments could coloured, the figures in the poster are 'real' in the way that comic- on occasion be thieves themselves. A tenth-century collection of book stereotypes are real. The carter who overloads the cart, the Jaina stories in Kannada tells of a picture-showman who was grocer who sells you short, the woman who goes for an abortion, hanged for stealing. While he kept his listeners enthralled by the cat burglar who breaks into your house, the profiteer who deals telling them punishment stories ([he horned demons and boil- in the black market, the butcher who sells meat are, in separate ing vats of my poster), other members of his gang made off with panels, shown committing the ill deed, the bad karma. The panels the bags of paddy belonging to paddy-merchants sitting in the below them show its terrible consequences. The offender is tied to audience. Until thirty years ago, according to Tyotindra Jain, a pole or stuffed in a vat, and as flames leap up from below a burly there existed in the oral tradition of the Garodas, a community of two-horned demon figure, spear in hand, disembowels him or, in picture-showmen in Gujarat, a description of a member of their the case of the abortionist, her. Some of the punishments are an profession: 'He moves around Gith a painted scroll. He wears a attempt at humour, ofthe rustic sort. The carter's punishment for sacred mark on his forehead and a turban on his head. On his overloading is that he is harnessed to a cart and made to do the shoulder he carries a bag and there is a stick in his hand.' work of the bullock. The load he is pulling is a smiling giant. Two The middle-aged man I had bought the poster from did not panels show the crimes of bribery and adultery. In these, both have a stick in his hand nor a turban on his head. He was wearing the bribe-giver and the bribe-taker, both the adulterer and the a shirt and trousers, and before giving me the poster had rolled it adulteress, are punished. Though her partner in crime is punished up and secured it with a rubber band. But he could have been a in the usual way, by being tied to a pole and disembowelled, the Garoda of Gujarat or a third-century Jaina mendicant, just as I adulteress is shown lying on the floor with a pole sticking out from could have been sitting in the attentive crowd, among the believers. her thighs. While she undergoes her torture, the two-horned devil My other mela poster, similarly printed on cheap paper and sticks out his long tongue at her. priced at one rupee, is a map. Though it saysTirthraj Prayag Map I had bought the poster at a local mela, as an example of modern in English and Tirthraj Prayag ka naksha in Hindi at the top, bazaar art, except that there was nothing modern about it. it's not a map in the traditional sense. On three sides, forming a Early Jaina literature of the third century CE has references to a border, are pictures ofgods, goddesses, and rishis: Vishnu, Shankar, 'mankha', a kind of mendicant 'whose hands were occupied by a Siddhanatha, Mahavira, Balmukunda, Lalita Devi, Gorakhnath, picture board'. Wherever a small crowd could be gathered, at a Kuber, Dharmaraj, Shesha, Markandeya,Vedavyas, Yama, Garuda, mela or shrine, you would find, among the fortune tellers, wrestl- Dattatreya, Bharadwaj, Kalabhairava, Narasimha, Satyanarayana, ers, acrobats, and mimes, a 'mankha' or more often a picture- and Rama, Lakshmana, and Sita. In the foreground are the rivers, showman, who, combining a display of gruesome visual images sky blue in colour, with tiny figures taking a holy dip, the bathers' with the art of storytelling, would tell his listeners about good heads no bigger than the letter 0. There are boats in the water, a karma and bad karma, about Shit River and the way across it. swimmer, and images of the river deities: 'Yamunaji' (sitting on a 132 Partial Recall turtle), 'Ganpji' (sitting on a crocodile), and 'Saraswatiji' (sitting young man with a shaven head and grinning from ear to ear. on a swan). Bridges cross the river. On one bridge are pedestrians, Some are bending over those who are sitting on the ground to get on the other a railway train, with a squiggle of smoke coming out a better view of what the woman is selling. One of the maps is of the engine. Across the bridge, against a bright ell ow back- similar to the one I have, with the buildings shown in a straight ground, is the city of Allahabad. line. Another map is without any buildings. In fact, nothing in it corresponds to any feature you might associate with a city map, As in tourist maps, Tirthraj Prayag Map shows places that are , ofinterest tovisitors.The places are not marked with a dot or circle even an imaginary one. It shows four rows of Hindu gods, the but a small picture. There are pictures of the clock tower, the entire pantheon as it were, and nothing else. IVo building. No museum, the Kamala Nehru Hospital, the university, Muir Col- bridges. No river even. This version, preserved only in Henri lege, Khusrau Bagh, the railway station, Anand Bhavan, and the Cartier-Bresson's ~hoto~raph,for I haven't seen it anywhere else, fort. Allahabad is not a city of temples, and the map has pictures comes closest to that imagine& reality called 'Tirthraj Pra~ag', of the few there are. Except for the fort and the clock tower, the the Lord of Pilgrim Places. buildings, arranged in straight lines and equidistant from each Uncle Mulk other, look the same. It matters little that they do, or that there is in the map only one unnamed road, snaking past the railway Everyone dies, but some people, writers particularly, get a second station. Meant for ordinary pilgrims, who will treat it as a divine life. This second life takes many forms: biography, memoir, a object and put it up with the other framed gods on their walls, it volume of uncollected work, selections of letters, a public archive does not aim to represent things objectively in space. The map is that preserves, for future researchers, the writer's papers. Not in purely imaginary with the names of some real buildings in it. India, though. Here, whether writer or not, you live only once. A Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph, taken at the Allahabad About ten years ago, I was in Bombay researching illustrations Kumbh in 1966, shows a woman sitting on the ground with for a history of Indian literature in English. A rich source of illus- pilgrim maps spread out around her. Some of the maps are stuffed trative material, like frontispieces and amply worded title pages, inside a plastic shopping basket, next to which is a small, unsteady are books published in the nineteenth century, and I was mainly pile of religious books. The woman's bangled right arm is stretched hunting for them but also for some later titles. One of the books over the maps to receive a glinting coin which a man is about I was looking for but couldn't find, and which none of Bom- to place in her open palm. The man, except for his hand, is not in bay's libraries seemed to have in their catalogue, was Mulk Raj the picture, but others are, crowding round the woman. Anand's The Lost Child. Published in a limited edition by the They are rural folk. From their clothes, especially the identically English sculptor and typographer Eric Gill in 1934, it wasAnand7s tied turbans, they seem to belong to the same community and to first book. If anyone had a copy, I reasoned, he would. come from the same village. Some of the men are standing, look- Anand's house in Cuffe Parade, with its gavel drive, cupolas, ing at the maps, others are sitting on the ground, among them a porte-cochi.re, and rose windows, is among the few remaining 132 Partial Recall turtle), 'Ganpji' (sitting on a crocodile), and 'Saraswatiji' (sitting young man with a shaven head and grinning from ear to ear. on a swan). Bridges cross the river. On one bridge are pedestrians, Some are bending over those who are sitting on the ground to get on the other a railway train, with a squiggle of smoke coming out a better view of what the woman is selling. One of the maps is of the engine. Across the bridge, against a bright ell ow back- similar to the one I have, with the buildings shown in a straight ground, is the city of Allahabad. line. Another map is without any buildings. In fact, nothing in it corresponds to any feature you might associate with a city map, As in tourist maps, Tirthraj Prayag Map shows places that are , ofinterest tovisitors.The places are not marked with a dot or circle even an imaginary one. It shows four rows of Hindu gods, the but a small picture. There are pictures of the clock tower, the entire pantheon as it were, and nothing else. IVo building. No museum, the Kamala Nehru Hospital, the university, Muir Col- bridges. No river even. This version, preserved only in Henri lege, Khusrau Bagh, the railway station, Anand Bhavan, and the Cartier-Bresson's ~hoto~raph,for I haven't seen it anywhere else, fort. Allahabad is not a city of temples, and the map has pictures comes closest to that imagine& reality called 'Tirthraj Pra~ag', of the few there are. Except for the fort and the clock tower, the the Lord of Pilgrim Places. buildings, arranged in straight lines and equidistant from each Uncle Mulk other, look the same. It matters little that they do, or that there is in the map only one unnamed road, snaking past the railway Everyone dies, but some people, writers particularly, get a second station. Meant for ordinary pilgrims, who will treat it as a divine life. This second life takes many forms: biography, memoir, a object and put it up with the other framed gods on their walls, it volume of uncollected work, selections of letters, a public archive does not aim to represent things objectively in space. The map is that preserves, for future researchers, the writer's papers. Not in purely imaginary with the names of some real buildings in it. India, though. Here, whether writer or not, you live only once. A Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph, taken at the Allahabad About ten years ago, I was in Bombay researching illustrations Kumbh in 1966, shows a woman sitting on the ground with for a history of Indian literature in English. A rich source of illus- pilgrim maps spread out around her. Some of the maps are stuffed trative material, like frontispieces and amply worded title pages, inside a plastic shopping basket, next to which is a small, unsteady are books published in the nineteenth century, and I was mainly pile of religious books. The woman's bangled right arm is stretched hunting for them but also for some later titles. One of the books over the maps to receive a glinting coin which a man is about I was looking for but couldn't find, and which none of Bom- to place in her open palm. The man, except for his hand, is not in bay's libraries seemed to have in their catalogue, was Mulk Raj the picture, but others are, crowding round the woman. Anand's The Lost Child. Published in a limited edition by the They are rural folk. From their clothes, especially the identically English sculptor and typographer Eric Gill in 1934, it wasAnand7s tied turbans, they seem to belong to the same community and to first book. If anyone had a copy, I reasoned, he would. come from the same village. Some of the men are standing, look- Anand's house in Cuffe Parade, with its gavel drive, cupolas, ing at the maps, others are sitting on the ground, among them a porte-cochi.re, and rose windows, is among the few remaining 134 Partial Recall colonial houses on that road, the others having been pulled down its glossy red cover, looked like an Indian wedding invitation. to make way for high-rise buildings. Surrounded by them, the It was of the same thickness, too. On the cover, in gold letters, house, in comparison, looked Lilliputian. I had gone past it it said The Lost Child and two lyrical tales by Mulk Raj Anand. many times but had never been inside. One evening the poet Adil Anand pulled his chair closer to the lamp and, sitting down,

Jussawalla, who lived across the road from Anand and knew him ' inscribed the book before giving it to me, signing himself 'Uncle well, suggested that we go and see him. Mulk'. One of Anand's Indian publishers had brought out the Anand, who was in his nineties, answered the door himself. He book as a gift for him on his ninetieth birthday, which partly was a short man with large, protruding eyes, and was dressed in a explained its celebratory get-up. Printed on cream-coloured paper loose khadi kurta and pyjamas. His voice, gently authoritarian in with the text printed in a shade of brown, the book was designed tone, was the voice of someone who, in his time, had been a dandy by Dolly Sahiar. and heavy smoker, though I'm not sure if he had been either. He 'The Lost Child' is about a lirtle boy's visit to a village fair with pointed to two cushioned easy chairs, which we took, while he his parents. There, he looks longingly at jugglers, balloon sellers, sat on the one beside a standard lamp, a side table next to it. sweetmeat stalls, and the roundabout, knowing that if he makes The room in which Anand received us had a larger room at- a demand his parents will drag him away. At some point he gets tached to it, which was probably Anand's study. Parts of the separated from them, and realizing what has happened begins to study, where the light of the standard lamp didn't reach, were in cry. Seeing his distress, a kind man takes him around the mela darkness. I scanned the bookshelves but, disappointingly, they again. He offers to buy the child anything he wants but the child were crammed with papers rather than books. Presently, a servant is inconsolable. All he manages to say is, 'I want my mother, I emerged from the shadows carrying a bottle of rum, three glas- want my father.' ses, and warm water in a jug. Anand's longtime companion, Dolly As Anand explains in a brief afterword, the story draws on Sahiar, hovered about. a childhood experience but is also an allegory. He also dwells Those who knew Anand in his last decades say that he had a on the circumstances of its first publication: repertoire of stories which he repeated to all visitors. The stories, from the days when Anand was a young writer, were about his The story 'The Lost Child' was written in the early hours of a morning encounters with the Bloomsbury set in London and his meetings in a room in Cambridge, from persistent recall in my subconsci- ous, of a poem by Guru Nanak, 'We are all children lost in the with Gandhi in Sabarmati Ashram. Unfortunately, I recall little world's fair.' of what he said that evening. At some point, I asked him about This memory brought back the panic I had felt when I had myself The Lost Child, hoping he would walk up to a bookshelf and got lost, at the age of six, in a fair in Kaleshwar village, on the banks get me the book. He said he did not have the edition I wanted, nor of the river Beas in Kangra valley of the Punjab Himalayas. The did he know anyone who might, but as we were leaving he went story was sent to seven magazines, and all sent it back with the usual inside and came back with something which, from a distance, with editor's rejection slip. 134 Partial Recall colonial houses on that road, the others having been pulled down its glossy red cover, looked like an Indian wedding invitation. to make way for high-rise buildings. Surrounded by them, the It was of the same thickness, too. On the cover, in gold letters, house, in comparison, looked Lilliputian. I had gone past it it said The Lost Child and two lyrical tales by Mulk Raj Anand. many times but had never been inside. One evening the poet Adil Anand pulled his chair closer to the lamp and, sitting down,

The artist Eric Gill read the story and graciously offered to print it, with two other lyric tales of mine, 'The Eternal Why' and 'The Conqueror1,as a little book decorated with an engraving, on his press at Piggots, High Wycornbe, Buckinghamshire, as a consolation for a budding author.

Few today will remember 'The Lost Child'; fewer still would be interested in its publication history or in the fate of Anand's papers. His first published story, like the papers he left behind when he died, has vanished into the thin Indian air, much as the announcement I once heard over the crackling public-address system at a mela has. It was about a boy who had gone missing. The boy's name, the announcer said, was Aman. He was 6 years old. When last seen, he was wearing a blue shirt and grey shorts and carrying a balloon in his hand. 136 Partial Recall

G.H. Hardy's A Mathematician? Apology, first published in 1940, begins: . It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he and other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings; there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.

Times have changed and few critics would today agree with Hardy's assessment of their minds. A Mathematician? Apology is not, though, about the distinction between makers and explain- ers. What casts a darkening melancholic shadow across its pages is the opening sentence. Hardy continues: 'If then I find myself writing not mathematics but "about" mathematics, it is aconfession of weakness, for which I may rightly be scorned or pitied by younger or more vigorous mathematicians. I write about mathematics because, like any other mathematician who is past sixty, I have no longer the freshness of mind, the energy, or the patience to carry on effectively with my proper job.' 140 Partial Recall The Bradman Chs 141 There is nothing sadder in the annals ofcreativity than what has of the Mint; 'his great creative days were over' by the time he just been said, and for poets it has a familiar ring. Coleridge, who reached forty, the discovery of the elliptic orbit came when he was was just thirty at the time, experiencing the loss of the mind's only thirty-seven. The old are of no use to mathematics, and the freshness, spoke of great mathematicians, as if aware of this preference, died early. In a moving passage, Hardy remembers them: 'Galois died at A gief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. . . If a man of mature age loses interest in and in 'Dejection'. But there is a difference between the mathematician's abandons mathematics, the loss is not likely to be very serious gief and the poet's. For the poet, the possibility that the grief either for mathematics or for himself.' will lift is still open; any moment might bring the 'deep delight' Sooner or later it had to happen. Hardy was old. Having of 'Kubla Khan'. Further, the loss of the 'beauty-making power' pursued a young man's game all his life, he found his 'mature age' has been recorded in apoem, the very fact of its existence proof all the more unbearable. (Watching cricket was his other passion that the poet's 'energy' and 'patience', whose loss Hardy mourns, and his highest term of praise 'in the Bradman class'. In the week are undiminished. Something similar happens in Hopkins's he died he told his sister, 'If I knew that I was going to die today, 'Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend': I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores.') C.I? Snow, birds build-but not I build; no, but strain, in his Foreword to Apology, compares Hardy to a great athlete Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. who has 'gone . . . over the hill', but where athletes take to drink Mine, 0 lord of life, send my roots rain. he 'took to something like despair'. When he couldn't take the despair any more, Hardy swallowed barbiturates and tried to kill When Hopkins wrote the sonnet, the dark rain-bearing clouds himself. From its first sentence, Apology had been moving towards had already gathered. In fact, the utterance 'send my roots rain' is this decision, and by the time it ends his mind is virtually made up. the rain he seeks, ending his despair. This miraculous change of weather is not something the mathematician is likely to experience. I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford. Of all the arts, then, mathematics is the most cruel, and the Since then I have suffered from that steady deterioration which is most attractive: 'If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and the common fate of elderly men and particularly of elderly mathematicians. A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas. It is plain now no one has a fairer chance of gatifying them than a mathemati- that my life, for what it is worth, is finished, and that nothing I can cian. His subject is the most curious of all.' Hardy then adds a do can perceptibly increase or diminish its value. word of caution: 'No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a Snow saw him regularly after the suicide attempt and des- young man's game.' Newton gave it up at fifty and became Master cribes the visits: 'He talked a little, nearly every time I saw him, 140 Partial Recall The Bradman Chs 141 There is nothing sadder in the annals ofcreativity than what has of the Mint; 'his great creative days were over' by the time he just been said, and for poets it has a familiar ring. Coleridge, who reached forty, the discovery of the elliptic orbit came when he was was just thirty at the time, experiencing the loss of the mind's only thirty-seven. The old are of no use to mathematics, and the freshness, spoke of great mathematicians, as if aware of this preference, died early. In a moving passage, Hardy remembers them: 'Galois died at A gief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. . . If a man of mature age loses interest in and in 'Dejection'. But there is a difference between the mathematician's abandons mathematics, the loss is not likely to be very serious gief and the poet's. For the poet, the possibility that the grief either for mathematics or for himself.' will lift is still open; any moment might bring the 'deep delight' Sooner or later it had to happen. Hardy was old. Having of 'Kubla Khan'. Further, the loss of the 'beauty-making power' pursued a young man's game all his life, he found his 'mature age' has been recorded in apoem, the very fact of its existence proof all the more unbearable. (Watching cricket was his other passion that the poet's 'energy' and 'patience', whose loss Hardy mourns, and his highest term of praise 'in the Bradman class'. In the week are undiminished. Something similar happens in Hopkins's he died he told his sister, 'If I knew that I was going to die today, 'Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend': I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores.') C.I? Snow, birds build-but not I build; no, but strain, in his Foreword to Apology, compares Hardy to a great athlete Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. who has 'gone . . . over the hill', but where athletes take to drink Mine, 0 lord of life, send my roots rain. he 'took to something like despair'. When he couldn't take the despair any more, Hardy swallowed barbiturates and tried to kill When Hopkins wrote the sonnet, the dark rain-bearing clouds himself. From its first sentence, Apology had been moving towards had already gathered. In fact, the utterance 'send my roots rain' is this decision, and by the time it ends his mind is virtually made up. the rain he seeks, ending his despair. This miraculous change of weather is not something the mathematician is likely to experience. I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford. Of all the arts, then, mathematics is the most cruel, and the Since then I have suffered from that steady deterioration which is most attractive: 'If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and the common fate of elderly men and particularly of elderly mathematicians. A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas. It is plain now no one has a fairer chance of gatifying them than a mathemati- that my life, for what it is worth, is finished, and that nothing I can cian. His subject is the most curious of all.' Hardy then adds a do can perceptibly increase or diminish its value. word of caution: 'No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a Snow saw him regularly after the suicide attempt and des- young man's game.' Newton gave it up at fifty and became Master cribes the visits: 'He talked a little, nearly every time I saw him,

154 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes

"about" the poetThomas Stearns Eliot? or my friend "the Possum"? Kick me around a bit more, 0 Lord. Let him rest in peace. I can only repeat, but with the urgency of I see at last 50 years ago: READ HIM.' there's no other way In 1976Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri appeared and as far as I know the for me to learn poets have taken no notice. None felt Williams's despair; none your simplest truths. Pound's excitement. Nissim Ezekiel, the author of the following ('The Egoist's Prayers i') doxology What do you say to someone so painfully honest? The vices I've always had A hundred Indo-Anglian years, which is an eternity, should I still have. have separated Ezekiel (b. 1924)and Kolatkar (b. 193]).Tragically The virtues I've never had for us, they belong to the same'generation. Ezekiel has not come I still do not have. From this Human Way of Life on the air, neither pro nor con, but Vrinda Nabar has and twice. Who can rescue Man I mention Miss Nabar since she is a poet as well as an academic, If not his Maker? and though I have not seen 'Arun Kolatkar: A Bilingual Poet', I Do thy duty, Lord. do recall what she wrote on Jejuri in the Times of India. It has stayed with me not because of anything she says about the poem ('The Egoist's Prayers ii') but because of a policeman she meets in a train. This, briefly, is ought to have looked askance at the man who was more inte- what happens. Miss Nabar, travelling first class, walks down to rested in getting small things right: the end of the coach and where the door to the toilet should have been she finds this beast in khaki unbuttoning his trousers. That's no doorstep. Fortunately, Miss hTabar is not alone and flies back to her com- It's a pillar on its side. panion who is sitting in the coupe. Miss Nabar will of course say Yes. that she was writing not so much about the book as the place from That's what it is. which it took its title, hence the train journey and the need for a toilet. Jejuri, though, is adored less for its reliability as a traveller's ('The Doorstep') guide and more for its, to use a word Miss Nabar should under- This takes up a page of Jejuri. First, what the thing is not: 'no stand, charms as a poem. doorstep'.Then, what it is: 'a pillar', but, importantly, 'on its side'. Disappointed, one looks to another critic. In 1977, the Osma- The third line compacts the poem to a syllable. The fourth is nia Journal of English Studies brought out a special number on whistled into the reader's ear. Now go back for some more of contemporary Indian poetry in English. Among the contri- the latest Ezekiel: butions, M.R. Satyanarayana's 'Jejuri: Arun Kolatkar's Waste 154 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes

Land'. If Miss Nabar comes across as a flirtatious schoolgirl, never know what the others did and unless answers to this and Satyanarayana is an escapee from one ofthose institutions people similar questions are forthcoming, we are not going to get our often want to escape from but are seldom allowed to. He now homemade world. The indifference, the incuriosity, will eventu- stalks the municipal garden of Indian poetry in English and we ally tell, and on us first. To lose sight of another man's work is don't have so much as a toy gun to shoo him off with. Here are to lose sight of one's own. some of the things he says:

His [Kolatkar's] sensibilities have been formed by the western civilization and he articulates them through American speech. The letters of Indian writers in English may never be published, but in case they are they will open up new areas of the literary It is a very well thought out design on the part of Kolatkar to have brought the pilgrim to the railway station for the return journey. terrain. One was suggested reoently by Adil Jussawalla in 'Six When the pilgrim arrives at the place by bus he is not yet steeped in Authors in Search of a Reader'. Quoting from letters he has 'the spirit of the place'. The indicator, the railway track itself, the received from friends, he tells us what a generation of Indian station master, and the timetable, all these lend themselves to artistic writers did in the late 1960s and early 1970s when no Indian exploitation in a manner no other mode of transport could have. publisher was interested in their work and they had to find their Kolatkar's attitude towards his subject might have been inspired by a readers on their own. Sandipan Chattopadhyay's Minibooks, new theory of humour with is now gaining currency-black humour. Vilas Sarang's stories in Encounter and London Magazine, and Whatever advantage this mode might have vis-a-vis social themes, the forming of publishing co-ops like Clearing House and New- black humour is at a disadvantage in dealing with Hindu mythology. ground were some of the strategies they adopted. The strategies worked. Chattopadhyay sold 1000 copies of the first Minibook There is no trace of a strained translation anywhere. within a week; Sarang's stories are to be brought out by New If Indian poetry in English is to save itself from its lunatic Directions [they eventually appeared as Fair Tree of the Void, critics, toy guns aren't enough. I think what we need is a switch- with an introduction by Adil Jussawalla, from Penguin India in blade. 19901; and Clearing House and Newground have published nine I have takenjejuri's example to show how a book, which is poetry titles between them, with more promised. so evidently a classic, can suffer from critical neglect. The same Not every story resurrected from a writer's files is so cheering. can be said about A.K. Ramanujan's The Striders and Relations, Should the executors of the literary estate of R. Parthasarathy Jayanta Mahapatra's A Rain of Rites, Adil Jussawalla's Missing allow the publication of his letters to Jayanta Mahapatra, the Person, and Gieve Patel's How Do You Withstand, Body. jejuri, reader of the future will find that the terrain here is different. On however, is a personal favourite. To me it is like a roadblock, 4 August 1979 Maha~atrawrote me a letter. In it, he quoted a which we have to climb over, or go round, or ram into, or push paragraph from one of Parthasarathy's letters to him, and I aside. Miss Nabar, brave girl, at least poses in front of it. We will reproduce it here since it refers to this essay: 156 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 157

I have serious doubcs if you should encourage dilletantish writing of with the bird, and the bird wonders if it has not gone too far in the the sort displayed by Rabi S. Mishra [see 'A.K. Ramanujan: A Point other direction. He changes tack and begins to speak in the voice ofview' in ChandrabhZgZ, No. 1, Summer 19791. It is easy to disclaim of the town's senior citizen, who spends his waking hours writ- responsibility by saying 'Opinions expressed in Chandrabh* are ing letters to the editor, complaining about the poor street lighting not those of the,editor but individual contributors.' But, in fact, arrangements. 'This kind of irresponsible writing must not go the editor is responsible as it is published only with his approval. I unanswered.' His civic duty done, the bird prepares to leave, but wonder if this is the first in a series of exercises at literary demolition. not before he has surprised everyone in the crowd by coming back I wish you would stop it. I enclose a letter which I hope you would be gracious enough to publish in Chandrabh*, No. 2, Winter 1979. instead. He is not any more the friendly uncle but a mixture of This kind of irresponsible writing must not go unanswered. I learn bawling child, school bully, and streetcorner hood. 'I learn Arvind Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is sharpening his knife to cut Rough Passage Krishna Mehrotra is sharpening his knife . . . Ifthis is true, I don't to size. If this is true, I don't think I am going to be amused by it. think I am going to be amused by it. . . . I am not sure you are If this is Chandrabh~~Z'seditorial stance, I am not sure you are serving serving any useful purpose, and whatever support you might any useful purpose, and whatever support you might expect, even expect, even that would soon be eroded.' In the end the hood that would soon be eroded. crushes his cheroot and blows a smoke ring. While I, I sup- Before I come to Parthasarathy's letter in ChandrabhZg~and pose, put the aforementioned knife to the ginder and watch his book Rough Passage, I want to look at the ten sentences the sparks fly. above. They illuminate a period of our history as nothing else does. They are also a network of roads that lead the traveller to the heart of Rough Passage. Mishra's is an irresponsible and unfortunate exercise in debunking a In his first avian move, Parthasarathy hovers over Rabi S. poet who is generally considered significant. In 1976 . . . I had Mishra and then rushes towards the irresponsible editor of Chandra- remarked: 'Ramanujan's repossession, through his poetry, of the past bhZgZ who encouraged the Sambhalpur dilettante to fling mud of his family and ofhis sense of himself as a distillation of that past is at A.K. Ramanujan. While he leaves Mishra alone, he jabs at to me a signal achievement . . .' Unaware of this fundamental aspect the editor, 'But, in fact, the editor is responsible . . .' Pleased, he of Ramanujan's contribution, Mishra, the English teacher, chastises him for not writing like Pope, Yeats, Eliot or Neruda. Irrelevant as hops back two steps and waits. Is this really, he thinks to himself, this comparison is, Mishra's attitude is not: it is potentially danger- the first in a series of 'literary demolitions' to be carried out by a ous . . . Might I suggest that Mishra stay clear of the treacherous suicide squad from Mahapatra's house, Tinkonia Bagicha? Well, waters of Indian English literature when he is so patently unfamiliar if it is then there is little our bird can do about it, and he may with the topography? already have overreached himself. So what does he do? In one ear he hisses, 'I wish you would stop it.' And in the other sings, 'I So Parthasarathy, in his letter published in ChandrabhZgZ, No. 2, enclose a letter which I hope you would be gracious enough . . .' Winter 1979. But what was the cataclysmic event that turned By now half the neighbourhood's children have fallen in love the azure waters of Indian poetry in English into a treacherous 160 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 16 1 swamp? Rabi S. Mishra begins 'A.K. Ramanujan: A Point of are so meaningless and trivial, there should be nothing to fear in View' by saying: them. And even if we heed the warning, is it true that a shell will burst in our faces ifwe read a poem by Ramanujan alongside one A study 0fA.K. Ramanujan's poetry leads one to the uncomfortable by Yeats? Other questions put themselves: should we read our conclusion that he is incapable of broad patterns of experience. . . . literature in cork-lined rooms or where voices from outside can He reflects an inherently narrow range, and with the intellectual thinness of his poems he cannot achieve the depth that should qualify enter? Should we attempt to further isolate Indian poetry in him for a significant poet. English or should we see if it can still find a place under the sun? Should we stifle criticism which seeks to expresses another point Mishra knows this to be a minority opinion and admits his ofview or should we watch it with interest? And should we terro- discomfort at the outset. Though ten years ago, writing in Con- rize the editor who publishes this criticism? temporary Indian Poetry in English, S. Nagarajan had made a Now Parthasarathy is no foot Elsewhere in the same letter in similar observation: 'Almost all the poems in the new volume Chandrabhzga he says that 'responsible criticism' is absent from [Relations] suffer to some extent from . . . intellectual thinness.' the Indian literary scene. 'What exists . . . is invariably laudatory Parthasarathy's response to Mishra is to state that it is 'unfortunate' in tone or is intended to damn with Gint praise. . . . There is no that Mishra has debunked a poet who is 'generally considered evidence in them of either scholarship or of the critical faculty at significant'. In the language of the Oxford Book of Children; work.' (Though a sentence in his personal communication to Verse, the response would translate as follows: Mahapatra quoted above shows how keen he is to hear criticism other than laudatory: 'I wish you would stop it.') He continues, There was an old man 'Those who write are familiar with British or American literature; And he had a calf, their terms of reference are usually borrowed from that literature. And that's half; He took him out of the stall, The exercise becomes, as a result, as in Mishra's case, inappro- And put him on the wall, priate and futile.' And that's all. A lot hinges on how we take the phrase 'responsible criticism', or for that matter 'the critical faculty'. Through clues provided by Having put the calf on the wall, Parthasarathy reminds Mishra Parthasarathy himself, we know what he would like to exclude that in 1976 he had decided, on everyone's behalf, the precise from its scope: everything which runs counter to his opaque nature of Ramanujan's achievement and therefore the subject was statements on poetry; selected acts of literary demolition; most closed. By way of advice, he adds that English teachers should references to British and American writers. I have a lot to say on approach the calf without making irrelevant allusions to poets Parthasarathy's opacities and will not go into them just now. So from Pope to Neruda; he feels that the attitude underlying it is far as demolition is concerned, one knows it to be an inseparable 'potentially dangerous'.The argument is odd. Ifsome comparisons part of the literary process, and ParthaSarathy, who taught at a 160 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 16 1 swamp? Rabi S. Mishra begins 'A.K. Ramanujan: A Point of are so meaningless and trivial, there should be nothing to fear in View' by saying: them. And even if we heed the warning, is it true that a shell will burst in our faces ifwe read a poem by Ramanujan alongside one A study 0fA.K. Ramanujan's poetry leads one to the uncomfortable by Yeats? Other questions put themselves: should we read our conclusion that he is incapable of broad patterns of experience. . . . literature in cork-lined rooms or where voices from outside can He reflects an inherently narrow range, and with the intellectual thinness of his poems he cannot achieve the depth that should qualify enter? Should we attempt to further isolate Indian poetry in him for a significant poet. English or should we see if it can still find a place under the sun? Should we stifle criticism which seeks to expresses another point Mishra knows this to be a minority opinion and admits his ofview or should we watch it with interest? And should we terro- discomfort at the outset. Though ten years ago, writing in Con- rize the editor who publishes this criticism? temporary Indian Poetry in English, S. Nagarajan had made a Now Parthasarathy is no foot Elsewhere in the same letter in similar observation: 'Almost all the poems in the new volume Chandrabhzga he says that 'responsible criticism' is absent from [Relations] suffer to some extent from . . . intellectual thinness.' the Indian literary scene. 'What exists . . . is invariably laudatory Parthasarathy's response to Mishra is to state that it is 'unfortunate' in tone or is intended to damn with Gint praise. . . . There is no that Mishra has debunked a poet who is 'generally considered evidence in them of either scholarship or of the critical faculty at significant'. In the language of the Oxford Book of Children; work.' (Though a sentence in his personal communication to Verse, the response would translate as follows: Mahapatra quoted above shows how keen he is to hear criticism other than laudatory: 'I wish you would stop it.') He continues, There was an old man 'Those who write are familiar with British or American literature; And he had a calf, their terms of reference are usually borrowed from that literature. And that's half; He took him out of the stall, The exercise becomes, as a result, as in Mishra's case, inappro- And put him on the wall, priate and futile.' And that's all. A lot hinges on how we take the phrase 'responsible criticism', or for that matter 'the critical faculty'. Through clues provided by Having put the calf on the wall, Parthasarathy reminds Mishra Parthasarathy himself, we know what he would like to exclude that in 1976 he had decided, on everyone's behalf, the precise from its scope: everything which runs counter to his opaque nature of Ramanujan's achievement and therefore the subject was statements on poetry; selected acts of literary demolition; most closed. By way of advice, he adds that English teachers should references to British and American writers. I have a lot to say on approach the calf without making irrelevant allusions to poets Parthasarathy's opacities and will not go into them just now. So from Pope to Neruda; he feels that the attitude underlying it is far as demolition is concerned, one knows it to be an inseparable 'potentially dangerous'.The argument is odd. Ifsome comparisons part of the literary process, and ParthaSarathy, who taught at a 162 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 163 college before joining Oxford University Press, couldn't have so Galdos, Turgenev, Flaubert, Henry James, the whole fight of modern quickly lost the perspective that comes in the classroom to not see enlightenment is against this. It is not of any one country. I name that ifpoets are struck down by one generation of readers they can four great modern novelists because, perhaps, the best of their work bounce back with the next; and on the critical necessity ofplacing has been an analysis, a diagnosis of this disease. a work both among its near (Tamil Brahmin, Poona Parsi, Goan Catholic) and distant (Catholic, WASP, Mormon, Jewish) re- Provincialism is more than an ignorance, it is ignorance plus a lust latives, there is Octavio Paz's 'On Criticism': after uniformity. It is a latent malevolence, often an active malevolence. (Selected Prose) . . . the space created by critical action, the place where works meet and confront each other, is a no man's land in our countries. The The word 'provincialism' brings into focus the drift of Partha- mission of criticism is not to invent works but to establish relations sarathy's Hindu revivalist mind. between them. . . . In this sense, criticism has a creative function: it Indian literature in English is in its pupal stage, which we can creates a literature (a perspective, an order) out of individual works. either preserve as a specimen or leave alone in the open to face the This is precisely what our criticism has failed to do. And that is why mild and sometimes inclement weather. there is no Hispano-American literature, even though there exists a whole body of important works. (Alternating Current)

There are, Paz says, two complementary tasks before a critic: 'to The poems 0fA.K. Ramanujan are a case in point. How are they show that Hispano-American works are a single literature, a field to be seen?Are they going to be buried like a treasure and guarded of antagonistic relations; and to describe the relationships of by a hound; worshipped like a village deity; turned into a two- this literature to other literatures.' headed freak with a long tail (minus the tail, its two-headedness Parthasarathy and I attach different charges to 'responsible could be one way oflooking at it, but this is not what I here mean)? criticism', just as Daruwalla and I did to 'poetic congeries'. If Or are they going to be read and commented on, praised and criticism has the health of the literary community in mind, its dispraised, as all poems are? frame of reference should. not be bound by a country's political These are some of the issues raised by Parthasarathy's Chandra- boundary. The superstitious manner in which Parthasarathy bh* letter, but peripherally. In its main part he says that refers to 'British or American' literature and to critics who . . . Ramanujan's work offers the first indisputable evidence of the 'borrow' from them was analysed by Pound in a 19 17 essay. 'Pro- validity of Indian English verse. Both The Striders ( 1966) and Relations vincialism the Enemy' begins: (1971) are the heir of an anterior tradition, a tradition very much of this subcontinent, the deposits of which are in Kannada and Tamil, PROVINCLALISM consists in and which have been assimilated into English. Ramanujan's deep- (a) An ignorance of the manners, customs, and nature of people est roots are in the Tamil and Kannada past, and he has reposses- living outside one's own village, parish or nation. sed that past, in fact made it available, in the English language. I (b) A desire to coerce others into uniformity. consider this a signrficantachievement . . . Ramanujan has successhlly 162 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 163 college before joining Oxford University Press, couldn't have so Galdos, Turgenev, Flaubert, Henry James, the whole fight of modern quickly lost the perspective that comes in the classroom to not see enlightenment is against this. It is not of any one country. I name that ifpoets are struck down by one generation of readers they can four great modern novelists because, perhaps, the best of their work bounce back with the next; and on the critical necessity ofplacing has been an analysis, a diagnosis of this disease. a work both among its near (Tamil Brahmin, Poona Parsi, Goan Catholic) and distant (Catholic, WASP, Mormon, Jewish) re- Provincialism is more than an ignorance, it is ignorance plus a lust latives, there is Octavio Paz's 'On Criticism': after uniformity. It is a latent malevolence, often an active malevolence. (Selected Prose) . . . the space created by critical action, the place where works meet and confront each other, is a no man's land in our countries. The The word 'provincialism' brings into focus the drift of Partha- mission of criticism is not to invent works but to establish relations sarathy's Hindu revivalist mind. between them. . . . In this sense, criticism has a creative function: it Indian literature in English is in its pupal stage, which we can creates a literature (a perspective, an order) out of individual works. either preserve as a specimen or leave alone in the open to face the This is precisely what our criticism has failed to do. And that is why mild and sometimes inclement weather. there is no Hispano-American literature, even though there exists a whole body of important works. (Alternating Current)

conveyed in English what, at its subtlest and most incantational, is Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages. Ifsometimes the poet skips locked up in another linguistic tradition. He has. . . indicated the the ritual of offering a prayer to Lord Murugan or his collaterals, direction Indian English verse is likely to take in the future. 'Prayers it does not follow that he stands disinherited.The whole question to Lord Murugan', overlooked by Mishra, is . . . embedded in, and of multilingualism should be looked at less jingoistically if it is arises from, a specific tradition. It is . . . the first step towards esra- to have any meaning, as I think it does. blishing an indigenous tradition of Indian English verse. We will remember that 'Prayers to Lord Murugan' is given as Both here and in his 1976 essay on Ramanujan, 'How It Strikes the example ofa poem which transfers to English what is 'embedded a Contemporary', the 'responsible critic' will find much that is in, and arises from, a specific, tradition.' This is precisely what vacuous, tautological, and ipse dixitish. translations try and do and Ramanujan says as much in the trans- The languages inherited by the multilingual Ramanujan may lator's note to Speaking of Siva: 'I have tried to. . . map the not conform to Parthasarathy's geological model. For the model medieval Kannada onto the soun'd-look of modern English . . . to hold we have to agree that Ramanujan arranges Tamil and The few liberties I have taken are towards a close structural Kannada in the lower strata, English in the upper, and each time mimicry, a re-enactment in English, the transposition of a struc- he chooses to write he descends, caged canary bird in hand, into ture in one texture onto another.' I therefore find it a little strange the thickly-seamed coal pit ofthe mother tongue. Unless we know that when Parthasarathy talks about Ramanujan successfully more about how languages are positioned in multilingual sensibi- conveying 'in English what, at its subtlest and most incantational, lities-do they always keep this inflexible, stratified order?-and is locked up in another linguistic tradition', he does not have The how writers relate to them, it is premature to dogmatize about the Interior Landscape and Speaking of Siva in mind but The Striders 'anterior tradition'. and Relations. Should we not say that since poems written in The phrase presents other difficulties. Does it mean that the English and translations from Dravidian languages, though done Tamil and Kannada traditions are anterior per se, and the poet by the same person, are materially different, they ought to be read with access to their 'deposits' has an edge over those who do not? in different ways? Or did M.R. Satyanarayana's nonsensical state- This is like saying that A.K. Ramanujan's pre-eminence as a poet ment that Kolatkar's Jejuri nowhere reads like a translation con- lies solely in his being Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan of ceal an important truth? And has ParthaSarathy not done the Mysore. In its context the phrase can also mean that Ramanujan's same thing by describing Ramanujan's achievement as a poet in 'roots' in the subcontinent go deep because he spoke a native terms that are similar to those which Ramanujan employs to write language first and learnt English subsequently (as if he was given about his aims as a translator? These questions are too arcane to a choice). Barring a few, most Indian English writers acquire the be answered with any definiteness at present. Indeed, the line language they write in and seldom lick it off their mother's teats. separating the Indian English poem as a weak act ofcultural trans- Everyone equally inherits the tradition which is 'very much of mission from one which is a work of art in its own right, a 'meta- this subcontinent', and everyone has access to its 'deposits' in the translation', has never been so missed. 164 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 165

ParthaSarathyalso refers to 'Prayers to Lord Murugan' in 'How is so inept that even the idea of interlingual contact is thrown into Strikes a contemporary'. Taking his ideas from a school head- doubt. He believes these languages are crucial to the work; he master's uplifting speech, he says that the poem 'examines a tradi- handles them like appendages. tion gone to seed, and invokes its relevance to our own times.' He There are several reasons for this. The one role Murugan's par- does not tell us anything about the tradition's functioning and ents did not train him for was to be a mould for Indian English how it went to seed, how the poem examines it, how the invocation poetry and so, given his physique, he wobbles away each time takes place, and what its relevance 'to our own times' is. Instead, Parthasarathy tries to catch him. As I look at it, the poem on he doles out bits of information about Murugan's changing Murugan is a risky example to choose to show how Ramanuian's fortune: in the sixth century he is eclipsed by Vishnu and Siva; work connects with his native idiom: a reader like Parthasarathy there is a revival of the cult a thousand years later. He approv- will not think twice about making the figure of the Dravidian god ingly quotes the poem's second section in which Murugan, in its symbol. When Parthasarath? says the poem is embedded in the tradition ofTamil heroic poetry, 'is vividly invoked'. He calls another tradition which Ramanujan makes available to us; he is Ramanujan's tone 'bantering' and points out three paradoxes. already reducing languages which are tissued in the multilingual He concludes his account of the poem 'overlooked by Mishra' sensibility to pictural shreds, to the framed surfaces of oleographs. with the following sentence: 'Paradox is a form ofindirection, and The other tradition does not enter Indian English literature in the indirection is a feature of poetic language.' (There are moments, guise ofa god, a river, a place, a cow named Gopi, or aTipu Sultan; and this is one of them, when Parthasarathy does not get even his nor as a poetic shell: a rubai, a doha, a vacana, or an abhanga. platitudes right. Indirection is not a feature of 'poetic language'; Their presence alone does not reflect the inlay of, for instance, it is a feature of language.) Tamil and Kannada in Ramanujan, and their absence will not Parthasarathy has told us why he thinks Ramanujan is a signi- mean that no inlaying has taken place. Ramanujan writes in the ficant poet. But since his method is fallacious-the thing to be manner of Tamil heroic poetry, Adrienne Rich writes seventeen examined (Ramanujan's 'roots' in Tamil and Kannada) is assumed poems based on the ghazal, and American poets in Cedar Rapids in the premises (he is the heir of an 'anterior tradition')-we are write haikus by the score. Have they not taken their forms from still in the dark about Ramanujan's significance. Where should a common pool? Is there any difference in the way non-English we look for it? What is the 'anterior tradition'? Where are the traditions operate in Ramanujan and Rich? There is none if we 'deposits'? How are they penetrated? Where is that miraculous restrict Tamil and Kannada to being suppliers of poetic forms and English poem conjoining these elements?Thesequestions become colourful gods. Ramanujan's multilingualism therefore is so in- more persistent once we accept Parthasarathy's geological model. laid in his work that in order to trace it we will have to look outside His simple answer to them is 'Prayers to Lord Murugan'. Ask the obvious signs. Once this is accepted we can further say that him how and he hands you his circular argument. Parthasarathy's if Ramanujan had written bucolics instead of vacanas and ended treatment of the presence of Tamil and Kannada in Ramanujan Relations with 'The Goatherd versus the Shepherd' instead of 166 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes

'Prayers to Lord Murugan', his 'deepest roots' would not have I have gone in Ribeyrac and in Sarlat, ceased to participate in the writing, but certainly their mode of I have climbed rickety stairs, heard talk of Croy, participation would be more difficult to plot. Walked over En Bertran's old layout, A note at the bottom of page 57 of Relations describes Muru- Have seen Narbonne, and Cahors and Chalus, gan as the 'Ancient Dravidian god of fertility, joy, youth, beauty, Have seen Excideuil, carefully fashioned. war, and love. He is represented as a six-faced god with rwelve hands.' Does one need to know more? Perhaps one does and a scholar could profitably study the origins of the 'cockfight and I have lain in Rocafixada, level with sunset, banner-/ dance' and the 'painted grey/ pottery' mentioned in the Have seen the copper come down poem. It is, however, necessary to keep in mind that Kolatkar tingeing the mountains, , in Jejuri and Jayanta Mahapatra in A Rain of Rites situate their I have seen the fields, pale, clear as an emerald, work similarly in 'specific traditions', and I hope too much fuss is Sharp peaks, high spurs, distant castles. not made about this aspect oftheir work since specificity is almost the first exercise in the book. To a poem the location-whether That age is gone; cultural, historical, geographical, or fictive-is everything: Pieire de Maensac is gone. At Rochecoart, I have walked over these roads; Where the hills part I have thought of them living. in three ways, And three valleys, full of winding roads, (Ezra Pound, 'Provincia Deserta') Fork out to south and north, The atlas has these qualities: it reveals the forms of cities that do notyet There is a lace of trees . . . grey with lichen. have a form or a name. There is a city in the shape ofAmsterdam, a I have walked there semicirclefacing north, with concentric canak- the princes: the emperors: thinking of old days. the nobles) there is the city in the shape of York, set among the high At Chalais moors, walled, bristling with towers; there is the city in the shape of New is a pleached arbour; Amsterdam known also as New York, crammed with towers ofglass and Old pensioners and old ~rotectedwomen steel on an oblong island between two rivers, with streets like deep canals, Have a right rhere- all of them straight, except Broadway. it is charity. I have crept over old rafters, (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities) peering down Over the Dronne, By going to a library the reader can identib most references to over a stream full of lilies. myth and religion, folklore and history, in the poems of Rama- nujan, Kolatkar, and Maha~atra.What the library cannot is 170 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 171 the prismatic interlingual space in each poet. This space Partha- the English phrase . . . Is a good deal of Nabokov's English a piece of has filled with Murugan's torso. Multilingualism could smuggling, an illicit conveyance across the frontier, of Russian verse now captive in a society he contemns? well be the crux of Indian literature in English, particularly its poetry, but unless the perimeter around the space is cleared and we We also require careful analysis of the local and literary background know more about the deployment of Tamil-Kannada, Marathi, of Nabokov's English . . . Oriya, and Russian in the English work of Ramanujan, Kolat- All these would be preliminary lines of inquiry toward getting right kar, Mahapatra, and Nabokov respectively, we need to tread like the 'strangeness', the polysemic nature of Nabokov's use oflanguage[s]. angels. All the plums in Ramanujan's basket are found growing in They would clarify not only his prodigious talent, but such larger Tamil and Kannada orchards; all are but nodules lying at the questions as the condition of multilingual imagining, of internalized bottom of the Palk Straits. Pluck, dredge, and make it 'available' translation, of the possible existence of a private mixed idiom in English: is that all to the manual? 'beneath', 'coming before' the lo~alizationof different languages in I have attached Nabokov's name to the list because his position the articulate brain. is analogous to ours and George Steiner, through his example, Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett are the other 'new "es- raises issues which are common to multilingual writers: perantists"' in Extraterritorial. Though Borges writes only in It would be by no means eccentric to read the major part ofNabokov's Spanish, opus as a meditation-lyric, ironic, technical, parodistic-on the His intimacy with French, German, and, particularly, with English nature of human language, on the enigmatic coexistence of different, is profound. Veryoften an English text-Blake, Stevenson, Coleridge, linguistically generated world visions and of a deep current under- De Quincey-underlies the Spanish statement. The other language lying, and at moments obscurely conjoining, the multitude ofdiverse 'shines through', giving to Barges's verse and to his Fictions a quality tongues. (Ex-traterritorial) of lightness, of universality. He uses the vulgate and mythology of I When Steiner moves away from subterraneity and looks specifi- ! Argentina to ballast what might otherwise be almost too abstract, too peregrine an imagination. cally for the 'sources and fabric' of 'Nabokese'--the Anglo- American interlingua in which Nabokov wrote after his move to As it happens, these m~ltilin~uists(Ezra Pound has his place in this the United States in 1940-he marks out an area and asks ques- context) are among the foremost writers of the age. The equation of tions which we should be putting to Ramanujan, Kolatkar, and a single pivot of language, of native deep-rootedness, with poetic authority is again in doubt. Mahapatra if we are to stay in the business as readers:

We need really detailed study of the quality and degree of pressure Borges, Steiner says in After Babel, moves among languages 'with which Russian puts on Nabokov's Anglo-American. How often are a cat's sinewy confidence'. Though he has a keen sense of the ir- his English sentences 'meta-translations' of Russian? To what extent reducible quality of each particular tongue, 'his linguistic experi-

do Russian semantic associations initiate the images and contour of 1 ence is essentially simultaneous and, to use a Coleridgean notion, 170 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 171 the prismatic interlingual space in each poet. This space Partha- the English phrase . . . Is a good deal of Nabokov's English a piece of has filled with Murugan's torso. Multilingualism could smuggling, an illicit conveyance across the frontier, of Russian verse now captive in a society he contemns? well be the crux of Indian literature in English, particularly its poetry, but unless the perimeter around the space is cleared and we We also require careful analysis of the local and literary background know more about the deployment of Tamil-Kannada, Marathi, of Nabokov's English . . . Oriya, and Russian in the English work of Ramanujan, Kolat- All these would be preliminary lines of inquiry toward getting right kar, Mahapatra, and Nabokov respectively, we need to tread like the 'strangeness', the polysemic nature of Nabokov's use oflanguage[s]. angels. All the plums in Ramanujan's basket are found growing in They would clarify not only his prodigious talent, but such larger Tamil and Kannada orchards; all are but nodules lying at the questions as the condition of multilingual imagining, of internalized bottom of the Palk Straits. Pluck, dredge, and make it 'available' translation, of the possible existence of a private mixed idiom in English: is that all to the manual? 'beneath', 'coming before' the lo~alizationof different languages in I have attached Nabokov's name to the list because his position the articulate brain. is analogous to ours and George Steiner, through his example, Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett are the other 'new "es- raises issues which are common to multilingual writers: perantists"' in Extraterritorial. Though Borges writes only in It would be by no means eccentric to read the major part ofNabokov's Spanish, opus as a meditation-lyric, ironic, technical, parodistic-on the His intimacy with French, German, and, particularly, with English nature of human language, on the enigmatic coexistence of different, is profound. Veryoften an English text-Blake, Stevenson, Coleridge, linguistically generated world visions and of a deep current under- De Quincey-underlies the Spanish statement. The other language lying, and at moments obscurely conjoining, the multitude ofdiverse 'shines through', giving to Barges's verse and to his Fictions a quality tongues. (Ex-traterritorial) of lightness, of universality. He uses the vulgate and mythology of I When Steiner moves away from subterraneity and looks specifi- ! Argentina to ballast what might otherwise be almost too abstract, too peregrine an imagination. cally for the 'sources and fabric' of 'Nabokese'--the Anglo- American interlingua in which Nabokov wrote after his move to As it happens, these m~ltilin~uists(Ezra Pound has his place in this the United States in 1940-he marks out an area and asks ques- context) are among the foremost writers of the age. The equation of tions which we should be putting to Ramanujan, Kolatkar, and a single pivot of language, of native deep-rootedness, with poetic authority is again in doubt. Mahapatra if we are to stay in the business as readers:

do Russian semantic associations initiate the images and contour of 1 ence is essentially simultaneous and, to use a Coleridgean notion, 172 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes reticulative. Half a dozen languages and literatures interweave. towards the Indies, the antipodes. Boyes uses citations and literary historical references, often in- And you, always so ~erfectlysane. vented, to establish the key, the singular locale of his verses ('Chicago Zen') and fables.' Read, for its Borgesian inventiveness, the following sentence VII from the Acknowledgements page in Relations: 'Among my conscious debts are a phrase from Vrinda Karandikar (page 22), one The questions which should be asked: What is a multilingual from Pablo Neruda's prose (page 20), and an incident from a sensibility? How do languages tenant it? How does this tenancy Kannada magazine story (page 5 1).' register on the poem? Steiner tries to answer these questions, but The examples of Nabokov and Borges are enough to show that even he does not answer as much as ask in Afier Babel. The area the Indian English poem needs to be read in a radically different is uncharted and all findings art tentative. Perhaps they will al- way: not as a delectable slice of reality which the critic-and ways be so. sometimes Parthasarathy-applies to his nose, but as a place, a Does a polyglot mentality operate differently from one that uses a construct, housing two or more ways of seeing; four-eyed; Chang single language or whose other languages have been acquired by and Eng. Ramanujan emblematizes this in his recent work: subsequent learning? When a natively multilingual person speaks, do the languages not in momentary employ press upon the body of Watch your step. Sight may strike you speech which he is actually articulating? Is there a discernible, perhaps blind in unexpected places. measurable sense in which the options I exercise when uttering words The traffic light turns orange and sentences in English are both enlarged and complicated by the on 57th and Dorchester, and you stumble, 'surrounding presence or pressure' of French and German? If it truly exists, such tangential action might subvert my uses of English, you fall into a vision of forest fires, making them in some degree unsteady, provisional, off-centre. This enter a frothing Himalayan river, possibility may underlie the pseudo-scientific rumour that multilingual individuals or children reared simultaneously in 'too many' rapid, silent. languages (is there a critical number?) are prone to schizophrenia On the 14th floor, and disorders of personality. Or might such 'interference' from other Lake Michigan crawls and crawls languages on the contrary render my use of any one language richer, more conscious of specificity and resource? Because alternative means in the window. Your thumbnail lie so very near at hand, the speech forms used may be more animate cracks a lobster louse on the window pane with will and deliberate focus. In short: does that 'intertraffique of the minde,' for which Samuel Daniel raised John Florio, the great from your daughter's hair translator, inhibit or augment the faculty of expressive utterance? and you drown, eyes open, That it must have marked influence is certain. 172 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes reticulative. Half a dozen languages and literatures interweave. towards the Indies, the antipodes. Boyes uses citations and literary historical references, often in- And you, always so ~erfectlysane. vented, to establish the key, the singular locale of his verses ('Chicago Zen') and fables.' Read, for its Borgesian inventiveness, the following sentence VII from the Acknowledgements page in Relations: 'Among my conscious debts are a phrase from Vrinda Karandikar (page 22), one The questions which should be asked: What is a multilingual from Pablo Neruda's prose (page 20), and an incident from a sensibility? How do languages tenant it? How does this tenancy Kannada magazine story (page 5 1).' register on the poem? Steiner tries to answer these questions, but The examples of Nabokov and Borges are enough to show that even he does not answer as much as ask in Afier Babel. The area the Indian English poem needs to be read in a radically different is uncharted and all findings art tentative. Perhaps they will al- way: not as a delectable slice of reality which the critic-and ways be so. sometimes Parthasarathy-applies to his nose, but as a place, a Does a polyglot mentality operate differently from one that uses a construct, housing two or more ways of seeing; four-eyed; Chang single language or whose other languages have been acquired by and Eng. Ramanujan emblematizes this in his recent work: subsequent learning? When a natively multilingual person speaks, do the languages not in momentary employ press upon the body of Watch your step. Sight may strike you speech which he is actually articulating? Is there a discernible, perhaps blind in unexpected places. measurable sense in which the options I exercise when uttering words The traffic light turns orange and sentences in English are both enlarged and complicated by the on 57th and Dorchester, and you stumble, 'surrounding presence or pressure' of French and German? If it truly exists, such tangential action might subvert my uses of English, you fall into a vision of forest fires, making them in some degree unsteady, provisional, off-centre. This enter a frothing Himalayan river, possibility may underlie the pseudo-scientific rumour that multilingual individuals or children reared simultaneously in 'too many' rapid, silent. languages (is there a critical number?) are prone to schizophrenia On the 14th floor, and disorders of personality. Or might such 'interference' from other Lake Michigan crawls and crawls languages on the contrary render my use of any one language richer, more conscious of specificity and resource? Because alternative means in the window. Your thumbnail lie so very near at hand, the speech forms used may be more animate cracks a lobster louse on the window pane with will and deliberate focus. In short: does that 'intertraffique of the minde,' for which Samuel Daniel raised John Florio, the great from your daughter's hair translator, inhibit or augment the faculty of expressive utterance? and you drown, eyes open, That it must have marked influence is certain. 174 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 175

Parthasarathy has implied one way in which languages tenant can devise a heuristic model to show the interplay of languages in a polyglot's brain: they are kept in layers and the relationship the central nervous system. In Hinduism the 'great' tradition is between them is that between source-language (Tamil-Kannada) Vedic, whereas the 'little' is woven from 'saints' legends, minor and receptor-language (English). "'Layers" is', says Steiner, 'of mythologies, systems of magic and superstition . . . local animal course, a piece of crass shorthand. It may mean nothing. The spa- sacrifices . . . wakes, vigils, fairs . . . worship of stone, trees, cross- tial organization, contiguities, insulations, synaptic branchings roads and rivers.' In the context of Indian English poetry, the between, which account for the arrangement ofdifferent languages 'great' tradition would be English and the 'little' revolve around in the brain of the polyglot, and especially of the native bilingual, the native idiom. Ramanujan has described how the two tradi- must be of an order of topological intricacy beyond any we can tions coexist within the structure of Hinduism: picture' (After Babel). There are several other ways in which langu- . . . traditions are not divided by impermeable membranes; they inter- ages can be arranged and each arrangement will affect the interflow into one another, responsive to differences of density as in an lingual relationship. In other words, one could provide the field osmosis. It is often difficult to isolate elements as belonging exclusively with new metaphors: languages as sources of light, attended by to the one or the other. eclipses and penumbral zones; languages as lightning conductors, A Sanskrit epic like the Mahabharata contains in its encyclopedic earthing each other's electric storms; languages as geological range much folk material, like tales, beliefs, proverbs, picked obvi- faults, sending mild tremors through each other; languages as ously from folk sources, refurbished, Sanskritized, fixed forever in conjugate mirrors. Since languages are motile, no single metaphor the Sanskritic artifice of eternity. But in a profoundly oral culture or cluster of metaphors is final. like the Indian, the Sanskrit Mahabharata itself gets returned to the oral folk-traditions, contributing the transformed materials back to [N]o topologies of n-dimensional spaces, no mathematical theories the 'little' traditions to be further diffused and diffracted. It gets 'trans- of knots, rings, lattices, or closed or open curvatures, no algebra of lated' from the Sanskrit into the regional languages; in the course of matrices can until now authorize even the most ~reliminar~model the 'translations', the regional poet infuses it with his rich local tradi- of the 'language-spaces'in the central nervous system . . . The membr- tions . . . Thus many cycles of give-and-take are set in motion. anes of differentiation and of contact, the dynamics of interlingual osmosis, the constraints which preserve equilibrium between the Though Ramanujan and Steiner are discussing subjects as blandness of mere lexical, public usage and the potentially chaotic dissimilar as Hinduism and multilingual imagining, both use prodigality of private invention and association, the speed and delicacy osmosis as a metaphor to describe their inner workings. If what of retrieval and of discard involved in even the barest act of paraphrase Steiner says about the reticular nature of Nabokov's and Borges's or translation . . . of [these] we can, at present, offer no adequate linguistic experience is correct, then languages have porosity just image let alone systematic analysis. (Af2er Babel) as religious traditions do, the 'great' and the 'little' are 'not divided Following the anthropologist's division of establishment by impermeable membranes' in either. The native idiom (the Hinduism into 'great' and 'little' traditions and Ramanujan's des- 'little') has to seep through the English poem (the 'great'); how cription of the terms in his introduction to Speaking of S'zua, we could it not?And if this is so, then each poet writes in an idiolect 174 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 175

as distinctive as 'Nabokese': Ramanujan's consists of English- from their suppressors who were also their neighbours. But Hinduism ~annada-Tamil,Kolatkar's of English-Marathi-Bombay Hindi, from the start is an alloy of the Brahmanic tradition and the many Mahapatra's of English-Oriya, and so on. Each poet belongs to a other and older Indian traditions. Due to [his long process of osmosis, tribal art in India, on the whole, lacks stylistic certitude and perfected- tribe of one or two, seldom more than of six or eight, and Indian ness of the tribal art of Africa, Oceania, and of the American Indian. English literature becomes a dream dreamt outside the several bodies of these phenomena. It is the dream of Gondwanaland. Between Nabokov's English and Russian, between Borges's Spanish The osmotic process ofthe multilingual common factor explain and English, between Ramanujan's English and Tamil-Kannada, Indian English literature's mottled look and its incohesiveness: for between the pan-Indian Sanskritic tradition and folk material, this reason we can hardly speak of Indian English literature as and between the Bharut Stupa and Gond carvings 'many cycles of we do of Bengali or French. What I call mqttled look has a parallel give-and-take are set in motion'. The Buddhist stone railings are in India's tribal art. The latter, according to~StellaKramrisch, lacks imprinted with tribal motifs; th; tribe, in its turn, assimilates the 'stylistic certitude', and her insight is based on the recognition of culture of its suppressor: it is the 'geat' tradition getting 'translated' osmosis in Hinduism and its percolations into adjoining forms. into the regional language. Nabokov's 'Russian version of Alice Though there can be few outward resemblances between Hinduism in Wonderland (Berlin, 1923)', writes Steiner, 'has long been re- and Indian English literature, there is at least one between India cognized as one of the keys to the whole Nabokovian oeuvre' English literature and India's tribal art. The model I have pro- (Extraterritorial). posed for the 'dynamics of interlingual osmosis' is supplemented There is another aspect to the model. When Ramanujan says by what Kramrisch writes in Unknown India: that traditions in Hinduism interflow into one another 'as in an Tribal art throughout India for the last two thousand years at least osmosis', he is referring, obliquely, to an analogous structure: his must be assumed to have coexisted with traditions commanding poems. His statement quoted in Ten Twentieth-Century Indian greater means and more complex organization. The Buddhist stone Poets is explicit: railings of the stupa of Bharut and the Stupa of the Saints, in Sanchi, both collective monuments of sculpture of the second to first century English and my disciplines (linguistics, anthropology) g'Ive me my BC, show the work of many different hands. These stone railings 'outer' forms-linguistic, metrical, logical and other such ways of with their carvings are each a symposium of styles, some of which shaping experience; and my first thirty years in India, my frequent bear affinity to tribal carvings such as those of the Gond who to this visits and fieldtrips, my personal and professional preoccupations day live not far from the sites of these ancient monuments. Buddhism with Kannada, Tamil, the classics and folklore give me my substance, was open to members of any group. The sculptors, however, were my 'inner' forms, images and symbols. They are continuous with not necessarily Buddhists, they were from the lower Hindu strata of each other, and I no longer can tell what comes from where. ancient Indian or tribal stock. Progressing Hinduization, while dis- solving much of the self-supporting and self-sufficient tribal commu- The semicolon in the first sentence is the osmotic membrane; the nities, absorbed as much as it destroyed of tribal traditions while binaries of 'great'l'little' are substituted by 'outer'l'inner'; in these tribes, where they survived as solid groups, assimilated much Hinduism 'It is often difficult to isolate elements as belonging 178 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 179 exclusively to the one or the other'; in his poems 'They are con- early to say how or where, the other language is the torsional force tinuous with each other, and I no longer can tell what comes in their work in the same way that Russian presses on 'Nabo- from where.' kese' and non-native French, German, and English glow beneath Ramanujan is not without the necessary cunning. Barges's Spanish. Indian English literature belongs with the work The answer to the third question, 'how do the "language- of these 'new "e~~erantists"'. spacesn register on the poem?' is dependent on how we answer the VIII first two. Ifa multilingual sensibility is a riverbed where languages deposit their silt and the 'spaces' are stratified, they will register on . . . words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and the poem but marginally. On the other hand if we look on the language that things first come into being and are. For this reason sensibilityas a crucible in which languages change theirproperties, the misuse oflanguage . . . destroys our authentic relation to things.- the effect is molecular. To Nabokov's sentences they give an intri- Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics cacy not elsewhere found in English prose; to Borges's what Alastair Reid calls 'a mysterious balance': Words are not a medium in which to copy life. Their true work is to restore life itself to order.--I.A. hchards, Philosophy of Rhetoric At a time when the validity of literature is often in question, Borges reads and writes as one who has no doubt at all of the power of Parthasarathy stands the epigraphs above on their heads when he words to illumine and disquiet. I always think of him occupying says in his introduction to Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets that netherworld of the translator and the bilingual, backstage in the that there are two problems the Indian English writer must comes great silence behind language, taking his careful daily walk from the to terms with: silence to the word, to the sentence, to the book, to the library, and back again. I think what we are most grateful for in Borges's work is The first is the quality of experience he would like to express in that from such disparate elements, such diverse reading, such multi- English. The Indian who uses the English language feels, to some ex- lingual experience, he has found a focal point, a mysterious balance, tent, alienated. His development as a poet is sporadic. And it is partly an equilibrium in a way that we, his readers, no longer thought because of this that there is, today, no perspective at all in which to possible in books. ('Borges as Reader') evaluate this phenomenon. The second is the of the idiom he uses. There has always been a time-lag between the living, creative In brief: for various phrenetical reasons-among them a suspi- idiom of English-speaking peoples and the English used in India. cion that Ramanujan has been carried away by a pack of Oriya And this time-lag is not likely to diminish, although it has today werewolves-Parthasarathy wrecks the axiom that links exist considerably narrowed down. between Ramanujan's English poems and his native languages. It should be kept in mind that Parthasarathy is not here talking Parthasarathy need not have repeated this four times in the same about the modernist crisis: the inward collapse of words, the paragraph of his Chandrabh* letter. Moreover, the axiom, as he fragments ofspeech, the crowded subway oflanguage that everyone understands it, has nothing to do with Ramanujan's significance. rides. 'The poet's language,' writes Valery, 'constitutes . . . an Most Indian English poets are bilingual and, though it is too effort by one man to create an artificial and ideal order by means 178 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 179 exclusively to the one or the other'; in his poems 'They are con- early to say how or where, the other language is the torsional force tinuous with each other, and I no longer can tell what comes in their work in the same way that Russian presses on 'Nabo- from where.' kese' and non-native French, German, and English glow beneath Ramanujan is not without the necessary cunning. Barges's Spanish. Indian English literature belongs with the work The answer to the third question, 'how do the "language- of these 'new "e~~erantists"'. spacesn register on the poem?' is dependent on how we answer the VIII first two. Ifa multilingual sensibility is a riverbed where languages deposit their silt and the 'spaces' are stratified, they will register on . . . words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and the poem but marginally. On the other hand if we look on the language that things first come into being and are. For this reason sensibilityas a crucible in which languages change theirproperties, the misuse oflanguage . . . destroys our authentic relation to things.- the effect is molecular. To Nabokov's sentences they give an intri- Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics cacy not elsewhere found in English prose; to Borges's what Alastair Reid calls 'a mysterious balance': Words are not a medium in which to copy life. Their true work is to restore life itself to order.--I.A. hchards, Philosophy of Rhetoric At a time when the validity of literature is often in question, Borges reads and writes as one who has no doubt at all of the power of Parthasarathy stands the epigraphs above on their heads when he words to illumine and disquiet. I always think of him occupying says in his introduction to Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets that netherworld of the translator and the bilingual, backstage in the that there are two problems the Indian English writer must comes great silence behind language, taking his careful daily walk from the to terms with: silence to the word, to the sentence, to the book, to the library, and back again. I think what we are most grateful for in Borges's work is The first is the quality of experience he would like to express in that from such disparate elements, such diverse reading, such multi- English. The Indian who uses the English language feels, to some ex- lingual experience, he has found a focal point, a mysterious balance, tent, alienated. His development as a poet is sporadic. And it is partly an equilibrium in a way that we, his readers, no longer thought because of this that there is, today, no perspective at all in which to possible in books. ('Borges as Reader') evaluate this phenomenon. The second is the of the idiom he uses. There has always been a time-lag between the living, creative In brief: for various phrenetical reasons-among them a suspi- idiom of English-speaking peoples and the English used in India. cion that Ramanujan has been carried away by a pack of Oriya And this time-lag is not likely to diminish, although it has today werewolves-Parthasarathy wrecks the axiom that links exist considerably narrowed down. between Ramanujan's English poems and his native languages. It should be kept in mind that Parthasarathy is not here talking Parthasarathy need not have repeated this four times in the same about the modernist crisis: the inward collapse of words, the paragraph of his Chandrabh* letter. Moreover, the axiom, as he fragments ofspeech, the crowded subway oflanguage that everyone understands it, has nothing to do with Ramanujan's significance. rides. 'The poet's language,' writes Valery, 'constitutes . . . an Most Indian English poets are bilingual and, though it is too effort by one man to create an artificial and ideal order by means The Emperor Has No Clothes 180 Partial Recall 181 the infinity of feelings, are quite fallacious. The infinite feeling of a material ofvulgar origin.' A haunting description of the crisis continues to be as infinite in words as it was in the heart. What is is Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos' Letter: clear within is bound to become so in words as well. This is why one For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into need never worry about language, but at sight of words may often parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one worry about oneself. After all, who knows within himself how things idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which really are with him? This tempestuous or floundering or morass-like stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back-whirlpools inner self is what we really are, but by the secret process by which which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void. words are forced out of us, our self-knowledge is brought to light, and though it may still be veiled, yet it is there before us, wonderful In Parthasarathy's account the Indian English writer, who or terrible to behold. (Letters to Felice) seems to have fallen off the footboard of twentieth century lite- Kafka's confidence in words was short-lived (who could have rature, faces a singular difficulty. The quality of his experience as sustained it?) and within a montL he was writing to the same cor- an Indian-whatever that is-and the language in which he is respondent: fated to express himself do not fit. The problem-alienation- will presumably disappear if the poet removes English and wears . . . hardly a word comes to me from the fundamental source, but is his native idiom. Kolatkar, by this reasoning, is wasting his time seized upon fortuitously and with great difficulty somewhere along fashioning Kolatkarese when he has the other cupboard stacked the way. When I was in the swing ofwriting and living, I once wrote to you that no true feeling need search for corresponding words, but with Marathi ready-mades. Buridan's ass was given a choice to eat is confronted or even impelled by them. Perhaps this is not quite from two equal bales of hay situated at equal distances from him, true, after all. but being unable to decide between the two equally balanced alternatives, he chose to starve himself to death. Kolatkar and One has to bring Parthasarathy's problem alongside Kafka's Ramanujan are better off. The bales of Marathi and Tamil are crisis to see how puerile it is. There are some moments when the so much nearer than the straws of English. Why, then, are they writer has all the garments for the dummy; there are others when giving up an uninterrupted poetic development for one that is he has none at all. Some mornings, language-the bale of hay- 'sporadic'? And why should they occasionally choose to strut is responsive to 'the swing ofwriting and living'; on others, words about in ill-shapen trousers when they can, instead, dress their have to be 'seized upon fortuitously' and the hay has disappeared. experience in flowing robes? The problem of finding the right Kafka's father, incidentally, grew up a Czech, never quite master- garments for the tailor's dummy of course does not exist. On the ing written German, and his son was aware that he too was a night of 18-1 9 February 1913 Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer: foreigner to the language. Three years before he died, in a letter to Max Brod, Kafka likened German to 'foreign capital' which had I am not of the opinion that one can ever lack the power to express not been earned but 'boisterously or secretively or even masochis- perfectly what one wants to write or say. Observations on the weakness tically' appropriated. 'This accounts', Eric Heller says, 'at least of language, and comparisons between the limitations of words and The Emperor Has No Clothes 180 Partial Recall 181 the infinity of feelings, are quite fallacious. The infinite feeling of a material ofvulgar origin.' A haunting description of the crisis continues to be as infinite in words as it was in the heart. What is is Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos' Letter: clear within is bound to become so in words as well. This is why one For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into need never worry about language, but at sight of words may often parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one worry about oneself. After all, who knows within himself how things idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which really are with him? This tempestuous or floundering or morass-like stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back-whirlpools inner self is what we really are, but by the secret process by which which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void. words are forced out of us, our self-knowledge is brought to light, and though it may still be veiled, yet it is there before us, wonderful In Parthasarathy's account the Indian English writer, who or terrible to behold. (Letters to Felice) seems to have fallen off the footboard of twentieth century lite- Kafka's confidence in words was short-lived (who could have rature, faces a singular difficulty. The quality of his experience as sustained it?) and within a montL he was writing to the same cor- an Indian-whatever that is-and the language in which he is respondent: fated to express himself do not fit. The problem-alienation- will presumably disappear if the poet removes English and wears . . . hardly a word comes to me from the fundamental source, but is his native idiom. Kolatkar, by this reasoning, is wasting his time seized upon fortuitously and with great difficulty somewhere along fashioning Kolatkarese when he has the other cupboard stacked the way. When I was in the swing ofwriting and living, I once wrote to you that no true feeling need search for corresponding words, but with Marathi ready-mades. Buridan's ass was given a choice to eat is confronted or even impelled by them. Perhaps this is not quite from two equal bales of hay situated at equal distances from him, true, after all. but being unable to decide between the two equally balanced alternatives, he chose to starve himself to death. Kolatkar and One has to bring Parthasarathy's problem alongside Kafka's Ramanujan are better off. The bales of Marathi and Tamil are crisis to see how puerile it is. There are some moments when the so much nearer than the straws of English. Why, then, are they writer has all the garments for the dummy; there are others when giving up an uninterrupted poetic development for one that is he has none at all. Some mornings, language-the bale of hay- 'sporadic'? And why should they occasionally choose to strut is responsive to 'the swing ofwriting and living'; on others, words about in ill-shapen trousers when they can, instead, dress their have to be 'seized upon fortuitously' and the hay has disappeared. experience in flowing robes? The problem of finding the right Kafka's father, incidentally, grew up a Czech, never quite master- garments for the tailor's dummy of course does not exist. On the ing written German, and his son was aware that he too was a night of 18-1 9 February 1913 Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer: foreigner to the language. Three years before he died, in a letter to Max Brod, Kafka likened German to 'foreign capital' which had I am not of the opinion that one can ever lack the power to express not been earned but 'boisterously or secretively or even masochis- perfectly what one wants to write or say. Observations on the weakness tically' appropriated. 'This accounts', Eric Heller says, 'at least of language, and comparisons between the limitations of words and 182 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 183 partially for Kafka's unending scruples about publishing what A little before Lord Chandos came on the scene, Rimbaud, he wrote. But sometimes he was confident that he had succeeded looking under the disintegration, said, in hammering out that "most personal" German style that was Old tricks of poetry played a large part in my alchemy of [he word. truly alive.' HofmannsthaI, Valery, and Kafka-and indeed several others- I became habituated to simple hallucination: I clearly saw a mosque realized that language, the sensitive plant, had withered. In ex- in place of a gasworks, a school of drummers composed of angels, open carriages on [he roads of heaven, a drawing room ar the bottom treme cases the writer, like Lord Chandos, felt that words had of a lake; monsters, mysteries; a title from light comedy would raise crumbled in his mouth 'like mouldy fungi'. The sensation that terrors before me. (ASeason in Hell) words sometimes fail to embody the quality-the 'what-ness'- of individual experience cuts across languages. 'There can', (Remember that festooned waiters hung from blue police chowkis Steiner writes, in Lear's 'Indian' poem.) Later, Louis Aragon will draw his inspiration from the same alchemical fount: 'Life is a language; writing hardly be an awakened human being who has not, at some point, is a completely different one'; and Eugene Jolas's transition will been exasperated by the 'publicity' of language, who has not publish 'The Revolution of the Word': 'The writer expresses. He experienced an almost bodily discomfort at the disparity between the uniqueness, the novelty of his own emotions and the worn coinage does not communicate. The plain reader be damned.' 'Hence of words . . . The secret jargon of the adolescent coterie, the the desire', writes Renato Poggioli, 'to create new languages', conspirator's password, the nonsense diction of lovers, teddybear talk attempts like that of young Stephan George or old James Joyce, or are fitful short-lived ripostes to the binding commonness and sclerosis of speech. (Ajer Ba6eI) the Russian poet Velimir Chlebnikov throughout his career. Each man constructed his own artificial and private idiom, conventional To the list of short-lived ripostes, add Edward Lear's 'The and arbitrary, based on onomatopoeic and etymological criteria, on Cummerbund': the suggestiveness of ambiguity and equivocation . . . Such a search for new languages . . . is perhaps the most striking inheritance left to She sate upon her Dobie, modern poetry by French symbolism and its numerous offshoots in To watch the Evening Star, Europe and America. (The Theory of the Avant-Garde) And all the Punkahs as they passed Cried, 'My! How fair you are!' 'The lacking word' and its aftermath is a rubric and Partha- Around her bower, with quivering leaves, sarathy should have noticed it. The backstage chatter is loud The tall Kamsamahs grew, enough to be heard: And Kitmutgars in wild festoons Hung down from Tchokis blue. The principal division in the history of Western literature occurs between the early 1870s and the turn of the century. It divides a When the curtain lifts on the modern period we are witnessing literature essentially housed in language from one for which language the spectacle of this breach of contract between word and world. has become a prison. 182 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 183 partially for Kafka's unending scruples about publishing what A little before Lord Chandos came on the scene, Rimbaud, he wrote. But sometimes he was confident that he had succeeded looking under the disintegration, said, in hammering out that "most personal" German style that was Old tricks of poetry played a large part in my alchemy of [he word. truly alive.' HofmannsthaI, Valery, and Kafka-and indeed several others- I became habituated to simple hallucination: I clearly saw a mosque realized that language, the sensitive plant, had withered. In ex- in place of a gasworks, a school of drummers composed of angels, open carriages on [he roads of heaven, a drawing room ar the bottom treme cases the writer, like Lord Chandos, felt that words had of a lake; monsters, mysteries; a title from light comedy would raise crumbled in his mouth 'like mouldy fungi'. The sensation that terrors before me. (ASeason in Hell) words sometimes fail to embody the quality-the 'what-ness'- of individual experience cuts across languages. 'There can', (Remember that festooned waiters hung from blue police chowkis Steiner writes, in Lear's 'Indian' poem.) Later, Louis Aragon will draw his inspiration from the same alchemical fount: 'Life is a language; writing hardly be an awakened human being who has not, at some point, is a completely different one'; and Eugene Jolas's transition will been exasperated by the 'publicity' of language, who has not publish 'The Revolution of the Word': 'The writer expresses. He experienced an almost bodily discomfort at the disparity between the uniqueness, the novelty of his own emotions and the worn coinage does not communicate. The plain reader be damned.' 'Hence of words . . . The secret jargon of the adolescent coterie, the the desire', writes Renato Poggioli, 'to create new languages', conspirator's password, the nonsense diction of lovers, teddybear talk attempts like that of young Stephan George or old James Joyce, or are fitful short-lived ripostes to the binding commonness and sclerosis of speech. (Ajer Ba6eI) the Russian poet Velimir Chlebnikov throughout his career. Each man constructed his own artificial and private idiom, conventional To the list of short-lived ripostes, add Edward Lear's 'The and arbitrary, based on onomatopoeic and etymological criteria, on Cummerbund': the suggestiveness of ambiguity and equivocation . . . Such a search for new languages . . . is perhaps the most striking inheritance left to She sate upon her Dobie, modern poetry by French symbolism and its numerous offshoots in To watch the Evening Star, Europe and America. (The Theory of the Avant-Garde) And all the Punkahs as they passed Cried, 'My! How fair you are!' 'The lacking word' and its aftermath is a rubric and Partha- Around her bower, with quivering leaves, sarathy should have noticed it. The backstage chatter is loud The tall Kamsamahs grew, enough to be heard: And Kitmutgars in wild festoons Hung down from Tchokis blue. The principal division in the history of Western literature occurs between the early 1870s and the turn of the century. It divides a When the curtain lifts on the modern period we are witnessing literature essentially housed in language from one for which language the spectacle of this breach of contract between word and world. has become a prison. 184 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 185

The poet no longer has or aspires to native tenure in the house of Parthasarathy begins 'Homecoming', the third part of Rough words. The languages waiting for him as an individual born into Passage, by saying history, into society, into the expressive conventions of his particular culture and milieu, are no longer a natural skin. Established language My tongue in English chains, is the enemy. I return, after a generation, to you. I am at the end A modern poem is an active contemplation of the impossibilities or near impossibilities of adequate 'coming into being'. The poetry of of my dravidic tether, modernism is a matter of structured debris: from it we are made to hunger for you unassuaged. envision, to hear the poem that might have been, the poem that will I falter, stumble. be if, when, the word is made new. (Aftpr Babet) Speak a tired language

The rift is between language and experience rather than between ('Homecoming 1')' a particular language and, in Parthasarathy's thoughtful phrase, and in the following section writes: 'everyday Indian reality'. The rift, moreover, does not vary from place to place: wide here, narrow there. So let us not say that the To live in Tamil Nadu is to be conscious development of the Indian English poet is 'sporadic' because he is every day of impotence. down with a mild attack of alienation complicated by 'time-lag'. There is the language, for instance:

English is his 'foreign capital' and it is up to him to steal it and the bull Nammalvar took by the horns, hammer out that 'most personal' style. In this he can either suc- is today an pnrecognizable carcass, ceed or fail. Am I also to believe that had ParthaSarathy and Shiv quick with the fleas of Kodambakkam. K. Kumar written in their mother tongues, Tamil and Punjabi ('Homecoming 2') respectively, their contributions to those literatures would have been any more remarkable? The tongue in chains; a tired language; language as a bull's carcass. For different reasons, generations of poets have felt these faded metaphors but, so far as I know, no one has quite left it at that. The tongue in chains, or something like it, inheres in the To write, as Flaubert and Goncourt understood it, is to exist, to be modernist poem; it is not flogged as the poem itself. From another one's self. To have a style is to speak. in the midst of a common perspective, ParthaSarathy's metaphors are the formulaic counter- language, a particular dialect, unique and inimitable, yet so consti- part of Homer's rosy-fingered Dawn. To heroic poetry, represent- tuted as to be at once the language of all and the language of an indi- ative descriptions and stock incidents were indispensable. AS vidual . . . If a man did not have style as a means of achieving variety, everything would be said in the first hundred years of a literature.- the bard intoned them, or repeated messages word for word, he Remy de Gourmont, Decadence and Other Essays prepared the next episode while the audience readied itself to 186 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 187 listen to him. This was the interval. In The World of Odysseus, wine-dark sea. The sea is all seas and in the Odyssey it does not call M.1. Finley points out that the incidents and formulas which the attention to itself; it's merely a screw in a large machine. Partha- professional bard inherited served as his raw material, his build- sarathy's night too is all nights, but far from being a rivet it is ing blocks. '[Elach work-each performance, in other words-is meant to be the ~oem'smainspring. a new one, though all the elements may be old and well known.' And who corresponds to Ravi Shankar in Homer? Grey-eyed But imagine the restiveness of Homer's audience had everything Athene. been left out of the Odyssey except 'the coming of dawn and of As if summing up my quarrel with Rough Passage, the blurb the night, scenes of combat and burial and feasting, the ordinary to the book says that Parthasarathy 'has the imagination and the activitiesofmen-arising and eating and drinking and dreaming- words to enclose an image totally in its universal as well as natural descriptions of palaces and meadows, arms and treasure, metaphors context.' A counterview to this would. be Goethe's statement that of the sea or of pasturage, and so on beyond enumeration.' This Randall Jarrell quotes in 'Reflections on Wallace Stevens': is precisely what Parthasarathy does in Rough Passage. In place of a specific chain-mark on his tongue, he presents a list of raw It makes a great difference whether the poet seeks the particular in materials for a poem. Divided in three sections ('Exile', 'Trial', and relation to the universal or contemplates the universal in the particular . . . [In the first case] the particular functions as an example, as an 'Homecoming') and spun out in three-line stanzas, it contains instance of the universal; but the second indeed represents the very 'formulas that could fit any incident'. nature of poetry. He who grasps this articular as living essence also Parthasarathy's linguistic crisis in 'Homecoming' lacks what encompasses the universal. Gourrnont called 'style'. In 'Exile', the poem's first section, the building blocks are even bigger: The Parthasarathian particular, seldom more particular than the In a basement flat, conversation tongue in English chains or whoring after English gods, is an instance of the Parthasarathian universal: the fate of English- filled the night, while Ravi Shankar, educated Tamil Brahmins (which is how the OUP catalogue des- cigarette stubs, empty bottles of stout and crisps provided the necessary pauses. cribes him); the 'inner conflict' ofeveryone who has been 'brought up in two cultures' (which is from the blurb); the fate of the He had spent his youth whoring Indian English writer; the fate of the Orientalist's Oriental. After English gods. There is something to be said for exile: Things are otherwise. The poet grasps 'the particular as living essence' and leaves the universal well alone. The tactive gesture you learn roots are deep. underlies all poems and, in a modest way, all riddles: ('Exile 2') Two bodies have I This is not any evening of smoking and drinking and eating Though both joined in one, but the defining night of Parthasarathy's sojourn, expressed for- The stiller I stand mulaically. In Homer, the corresponding formula would be the The faster I run. 186 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 187 listen to him. This was the interval. In The World of Odysseus, wine-dark sea. The sea is all seas and in the Odyssey it does not call M.1. Finley points out that the incidents and formulas which the attention to itself; it's merely a screw in a large machine. Partha- professional bard inherited served as his raw material, his build- sarathy's night too is all nights, but far from being a rivet it is ing blocks. '[Elach work-each performance, in other words-is meant to be the ~oem'smainspring. a new one, though all the elements may be old and well known.' And who corresponds to Ravi Shankar in Homer? Grey-eyed But imagine the restiveness of Homer's audience had everything Athene. been left out of the Odyssey except 'the coming of dawn and of As if summing up my quarrel with Rough Passage, the blurb the night, scenes of combat and burial and feasting, the ordinary to the book says that Parthasarathy 'has the imagination and the activitiesofmen-arising and eating and drinking and dreaming- words to enclose an image totally in its universal as well as natural descriptions of palaces and meadows, arms and treasure, metaphors context.' A counterview to this would. be Goethe's statement that of the sea or of pasturage, and so on beyond enumeration.' This Randall Jarrell quotes in 'Reflections on Wallace Stevens': is precisely what Parthasarathy does in Rough Passage. In place of a specific chain-mark on his tongue, he presents a list of raw It makes a great difference whether the poet seeks the particular in materials for a poem. Divided in three sections ('Exile', 'Trial', and relation to the universal or contemplates the universal in the particular . . . [In the first case] the particular functions as an example, as an 'Homecoming') and spun out in three-line stanzas, it contains instance of the universal; but the second indeed represents the very 'formulas that could fit any incident'. nature of poetry. He who grasps this articular as living essence also Parthasarathy's linguistic crisis in 'Homecoming' lacks what encompasses the universal. Gourrnont called 'style'. In 'Exile', the poem's first section, the building blocks are even bigger: The Parthasarathian particular, seldom more particular than the In a basement flat, conversation tongue in English chains or whoring after English gods, is an instance of the Parthasarathian universal: the fate of English- filled the night, while Ravi Shankar, educated Tamil Brahmins (which is how the OUP catalogue des- cigarette stubs, empty bottles of stout and crisps provided the necessary pauses. cribes him); the 'inner conflict' ofeveryone who has been 'brought up in two cultures' (which is from the blurb); the fate of the He had spent his youth whoring Indian English writer; the fate of the Orientalist's Oriental. After English gods. There is something to be said for exile: Things are otherwise. The poet grasps 'the particular as living essence' and leaves the universal well alone. The tactive gesture you learn roots are deep. underlies all poems and, in a modest way, all riddles: ('Exile 2') Two bodies have I This is not any evening of smoking and drinking and eating Though both joined in one, but the defining night of Parthasarathy's sojourn, expressed for- The stiller I stand mulaically. In Homer, the corresponding formula would be the The faster I run. 188 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothej 189

The riddle-maker must have possessed an hourglass. London spread out in the sun,/ Its postal districts packed like Goethe's 'particular'; Hopkins's 'inscape' ('AH the world is full squares of wheat.' of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as The faces at La Concorde that caught Pound's eye and Larkin a purpose: looking out of my window I caught it in the random seeing London from a train that Saturday afternoon: moments clods and broken heaps of snow made by the cast of a broom.'); detached from time and placed across its channel. (Literature as Rilke's 'Things' ('If can manage it, return with a portion of counterforce affecting the reader's pulse.) You cannot step into the your weaned and grown-up feeling to any one of the things of same river twice, but you might succeed in taking away something your childhood with which you were much occupied . . . Was it from it. Poetic seeing is akin to lock picking, and art receives sight's not with aThing that you first shared your little heart, like a piece stolen goods. '[llhe greatest thing a human soul ever does in of bread that had to suffice for two?'); Walter Benjamin's 'aura' this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain ('If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your way. . . . To see clearly is poetfy, prophecy, and religion, all in eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts one' (John Ruskin, Modern Painters). its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, 'What you look hard at', Hopkins says in the Notebooks, that branch.') There is only one axis and these testaments are 'seems to look hard at you.' Parthasarathy's faceless metropolis points on it. At bottom, poetry is perception's flame burning in a takes after his faceless exile. Only someone so averse to seeing and thousand votive lamps. A sixth-century Greek pottery lamp in the listening could have written Hermitage bears the words 'I am a lamp and I shine for gods and men'. ParthaSarathy extinguishes it. When he wakes up from the 'coloureds' is what they call us over there-the city is no jewel, either: dark night of exile, this is what his rosy-fingered Dawn looks like: lanes full of smoke and litter, The noises reappear with puddles of unwashed of early trains, the milkman, English children. and the events of the day become vocal in the newsboy. ('Exile 2')

('Exile 2') or made an old man say on New Year's Eve

Four lines is a lot of lines. Pound needed half their number to An empire's last words are heard record his impression of a crowd in a station of the Metro. In 'The on the hot sands of Africa. Whitsun Weddings', Philip Larkin approaches the city Partha- The da Gamas, Clives, Dupleixs are back. sarathy is about to leave, and had Parthasarathy not exhausted himself chasing after i~niversals,he too might have 'thought of 'Exile 2') 188 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothej 189

('Exile 2') or made an old man say on New Year's Eve

From the death cells in sight of Mt Taishan, Pound remember- Pound hears words ('Yurra Jurrmun!'), not ideas; and sees ed. In Canto 83 it is Stone Cottage and Uncle William (which is luminous details ('the gulls be as neat'). Compare this with W.B. Yeats) '"coloureds" is what they call us' and the old man's stagy recital. The difference between them is the difference between particu- who would not eat ham for dinner because peasants eat ham for dinner lars and universals, poetry and poppycock, an ant from a broken despite the excellent quality anthill and a stuffed owl. and the pleasure of having it hot. . . I have drawn attention to two exiles, two Londons, and two homecomings for another reason: in the hope that someone will In Canto 80 it is a brief encounter in a London street: look into all the implications of the following declaration:

and a navvy rolls up to me in Church St. (Kensington End) with English being a foreign language, the words are not burdened with Yurra Jurrmun! irrelevant associations for the poet. They are invariably ordinary To which I replied: I am not. and inconspicuous; rarely, if ever, reverberant. And herein lies their 'Well yurr szum kind ov a furriner.'- strength. There is something clinical about Ramanujan's use of language. It has a cold, glass-like quality. It is an attempt to turn language The incident took place in 1914-15, and the navvy is justly into an artifact.-(R. Parthasarathy, Introduction to Ten Twentieth- suspicious of the 'furriner' going about in a velvet coat and red tie. Century Indian Poets) Pound writes towards the end of the Canto: In effect, the Indian English poet, missing out on the 'landscapes and the Serpentine will look just the same of experience, the fields of idiomatic, symbolic, communal refer- and the gulls be as neat on the pond ence which give to language its specific gravity' (AfZer Babel), uses and the sunken garden unchanged what I.A. Richards has called 'English of some sort', Parthasara- and God knows what else is left of our London my London, your London thy's 'words . . . not burdened with irrelevant associations', which Steiner likens to 'a thin wash, marvelously fluid, but without 1 When Pound remembered the gulls on the Round Pond he was adequate base. One need only converse with Japanese colleagues locked up in an outdoor cage, measuring six feet by six and a half, and students, whose technical proficiency in English humbles in the Detention Training Center, a place described by the guards one, to realize how profound are the effects of dislocation. So as 'the arse hole of the army'. It lay north of Pisa. A few months much that is being said is correct, so little is right.' Is it because later, in November 1945, Pound's exile came to an end; he was of this thin wash, which Professor Steiner's Japanese students transferred to Chestnut Ward, St Elizabeth's Hospital for the also possess, that Ramanujan's poems have a glass-like quality? Criminally Insane, Washington, DC. Robert Frost, later to claim Parthasarathy had earlier, in similar fashion, trivialized 'Prayers to credit for Pound's release, said to Richard Wilbur, 'To hell with Lord Murugan'. He ~erformsthe same feat again by confusing him, he's where he belongs.' He lived there for the next twelve artificial language with linguistic artifact, and through a habitual years; it was a sort of homecoming. use of non sequiturs. 190 Partial Recall The Emperor Has No Clothes 191

X I am through with the city. No better than ghettos, the suburbs. Diversity is as abundant as all the tones of voice, as all the various ('Exile 5') manners of walking, coughing, blowing the nose, sneezing. Among fruits we distinguish grapes, among grapes the muscat, among muscats What have I come first the Condrieu variety, then the Desargues, then the particular here for from a thousand miles? stock. But is this all? Has a vine ever produced two bunches alike, or a bunch two similar grapes? The sky is no different. Beggars are the same e~er~where.The clubs I have never judged anything twice in exactly the same way. are there, complete with bar and golf-links. A town, a landscape are when seen from afar a town and landscape; ('Exile 7') but as one gets nearer, there are houses, trees, tiles, leaves, grasses, . 'All men', said Confucius, 'eat and drink; few distinguish the ants, legs of ants, and so on to infinity. All is contained under the name of landscape. flavours.' Wandering among London's crowds-among 'puddles of unwashed1 English children1-Wordsworth So runs a vision of things; it is Pascal's. Confronting it is the was smitten purblind one; it gives us, apart from pronouncements and threats, Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare) the cardboard cities of Rough Passage: Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face, Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest It was always evening when we entered Wearing a written paper to explain a city. Empty streets, His story, whence he came, and who he was. perhaps a drizzle or, as in Asia, Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round dust and famished children stopped us. As with the might of waters; an apt type This label seemed of the utmost we can know, Both of ourselves and of the universe . . . The streets are noisy, and trees ( Tile Prelude [1850], Book VII) on Malabar Hill blind with dust. Spring had gone unnoticed . . . Wordsworth gazed 'on the shape ofthat unmoving man,/ His steadfast face and sightless eyes . . .I As ifadmonished from another world.' But ('Exile 3') if we go to language with a pickaxe and wicker basket, the result is

The city reels under the heavy load A grey sky oppresses the eyes: of smoke. Its rickety legs porters, rickshaw-pullers, barbers, hawkers, break wind . . . fortune-tellers, loungers compose the scene. ('Exile 8') The Emperor Has No Clothes 194 Partial Recall 195 Whose Language is English' in The Dying Gauland Other Writings This rubble exemplifies one kind of Indian English poetry. (London, 1978), pp. 30-4. Literature had its plagiarist on the Rough Passage is an anonymous quarrier's grave. grand scale in Coleridge but this is petty larceny. That it should already be so much a part of a literature so young cannot bring Postscript much joy-or hope. In sections V, VI and VII of this essay I have not questioned the assumption that, whatever its fallacies, Parthasarathy's letter to Chandrabh* was an honest response to Rabi S. Mishra's essay A.K. Ramanujan: A Point of View'. Working from Parthasara- thy's response, I have tried to bring the Indian poem in English closer to what I felt was its first home: multilingual imagining. In course of time the interplay of languages-of outlooks-in these Indian poems will be better understood. I would not have been able to write the essay in quite the way I have had I pointed out at the start that key phrases in the two sentences which gave me so much trouble in Parthasara- thy's letter-

Both The Striders (1966) and Relations (1971) are the heir of an anterior rradition, a tradition very much of this subcontinent, the deposits of which are in Kannada and Tamil, and which have been assimilated into English. and

Ramanujan has successfully conveyed in English what, ar its subtlest and most incantational, is locked up in another linguistic tradition.

-were plagiarisms. Instead ofwriting those sections I would then have written a one-line dismissal and called ParthaSarathy an old knave, after which there would have been nothing more to add. The key phrases in the two sentences are purloined from David Jones's essay 'On the Difficulties of One Writer of Welsh Affinity The Emperor Has No Clothes 194 Partial Recall 195 Whose Language is English' in The Dying Gauland Other Writings This rubble exemplifies one kind of Indian English poetry. (London, 1978), pp. 30-4. Literature had its plagiarist on the Rough Passage is an anonymous quarrier's grave. grand scale in Coleridge but this is petty larceny. That it should already be so much a part of a literature so young cannot bring Postscript much joy-or hope. In sections V, VI and VII of this essay I have not questioned the assumption that, whatever its fallacies, Parthasarathy's letter to Chandrabh* was an honest response to Rabi S. Mishra's essay A.K. Ramanujan: A Point of View'. Working from Parthasara- thy's response, I have tried to bring the Indian poem in English closer to what I felt was its first home: multilingual imagining. In course of time the interplay of languages-of outlooks-in these Indian poems will be better understood. I would not have been able to write the essay in quite the way I have had I pointed out at the start that key phrases in the two sentences which gave me so much trouble in Parthasara- thy's letter-

Ramanujan has successfully conveyed in English what, ar its subtlest and most incantational, is locked up in another linguistic tradition.

from the native states. British domination eventually covered all aspects of lndian life-political, economic, social, cultural. The introduction of English into the complex, hierarchical language Towards a History system of India has proved the most enduring aspect of this domi- of Indian Literature of English nation. By 1800 the battles of Plassey (1 757) and Buxar (1764) were fought and lost. Siraj-ud-Daula's defeat at Plassey was less at the hands of Col. Robert Clive than at those of the compradors of Bengal, the Jagat Seths. Seeing their profit margins reduced by Hindoostan, has by the people of modern Europe, been understood to mean the tract situated between the river Ganges Mughal impositions on their commerce, these wealthy Hindu and Indus, on the east and west; the Thibetian and Tartarian and lain merchants and bankers, fogether with powerful members mountains, on the north; and the sea on the south.-Major of the nawab's court, plotted his overthrow, a conspiracy in which James Rennell, Introduction to AZemoir ofu Mup ofHindoostan; the East India Company joined. Militarily the battle was not more OK the Mogul? Empire (1786) than a skirmish; according to one estimate there were only seventy-two dead after counting the figures on both sides, but as The expression 'Indid shall mean British India, together with any territories of any native prince or chief under the suzerainty Joshua Marshman wrote in his influential Bharatvarsher Itihas of Her Majesty, exercized under the Governor-General, or (I 831), it 'changed the destinies of sixty million people in a through anp.Governor or other officer subordinate to the vast kingdom'. Governor-General of India. -Interpretation Act of 1889 Among those whose destiny it affected was Dean Mahomed (1759-1 85l), the author of The TrtLveLsofDean Mahomet (1794), . . . the State of Chhokrapur, if indeed it ever existed, has dissolved away in the new map of India. -1.R. Ackerley, Preface to the the first book ever written and published by an Indian in English. 2nd edn of Hindoo Holiday (1952) Born in Patna into a family that had traditionally served the Mughal empire, he joined, as had his father and brother before An Illustrated History of lndia~zLiterature in English (New Llelhi: him, the East IndiaCompany's Bengal Army in 1769 and travelled Permanent Black, 2003), a volume which covers almost two with it as a camp follower and subaltern officer for the next fifteen hundred years of the literature written largely by Indians in Eng- years, going as far north as Delhi. His book, in the form of a series lish, has for its starting point the year 1800. The date has no of letters to a fictive friend, is in large measure based on his literarysignificance but is chosen for its rough and ready usefulness: experiences in the colonial army. In 1784 he emigrated to Ireland, by 1800 there was no real challenge left to the British domination settling down in Cork and marrying a young local Anglo-lrish of India from either the other European powers in the region-the woman. He also converted to the Protestant faith. In later life, Dutch, French, and Portuguese-nor, except for the Marathas, after unsuccessfully running the Hindostanee Coffee House near Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 197

Portman Square, London, he set himself up as a 'Shampooing received 'the Duanney' in his tent. Two of the six Englishmen in Surgeon' in Brighton, where his herbal 'Indian Vapour Bath' was the picture were not present with him in Allahabad on that day, immediately popular and attracted the patronage of King George and the emperor's throne, far from being a canopied, oriental IV who, in 1822, bestowed a Royal Warrant upon him. affair, was in fact Clive's dining table surmounted by an armchair. Plassey effectively brought Bengal under Company rule and, At about the time Shah Alam was being reduced to a piece of following Mir Qasim's defeat, Buxar added the contiguous terri- rococo furniture, Captain James Rennell, who had already spent tory of Avadh to the areas already under British influence. The five years in the country and carried out extensive surveys of the Company now controlled the eastern Gangetic plain from Benares coastal areas of southern India, was appointed by Clive as the to Calcutta. In the following year, 1765, the Mughal emperor first Surveyor-General of Bengal. The Bengal Atlas that Rennell appointed the East India Company his diwan (or chief financial brought out in 1779, the culmination of more than a decade's manager) of the provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, thereby effort, was the first modern atlasof the province. As more colo- enabling it to collect revenue on his behalf Known as the Treaty nial administrators realized the importance of cartography to ofAllahabad, this arrangement has been called 'the truly inaugural empire building, Rennell's pioneering effort was duplicated in moment of the Raj'. The Company's accession to diwani, Ranajit other British-controlled Indian territories, notably by Captain Guha says in An Indian Historiography of India (1988)) 'brought Colin Mackenzie in the Deccan, and by him and Major William together in one single instance all the three fundamental aspects Lambton, after the fall ofTipu Sultan in 1799, in Mysore. Corres- of colonialism in our subcontinent, namely, its origin in an act of ponding with the labours of these soldier-engineers, the British force, its exploitation of the primary produce of the land as the set about mapping the intellectual, cultural, and historical dimen- very basis of a colonial economy, and its need to give force and sions oftheir new territories. Comparative philology, lexicography, exploitation the appearance of legality.' and translation were some of the areas opened up by Sir Charles There is to this inaugural moment of the Raj, as there was Wilkins, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Sir William !ones, John sometimes to the Raj itself, a touch of farce. When, thirty years Gilchrist, and Henry Colebrooke, all of whom are now remem- later, the painter Benjamin West depicted the treaty-lord Clive bered as pioneering 'Orientalists'. receivingf;orn the Moghul the Grant of the Duannephe showed The British interest in Indian languages, as Halhed bluntly the Mughal emperor Shah Alam in an imperial setting, seated said, arose from the necessity of having to cultivate 'a medium of under a canopy on a raised throne, from where he hands Clive a intercourse between the Government and its subjects, between rolled document. There are elephants in the background and in the natives of Europe who are to rule, and the inhabitants of India the foreground attendants. Clive's party, consisting of six who are to obey.' But the scholar-administrators who busied Englishmen, is shown on the left of the canvas. Some of the Eng- themselves with Persian and Sanskrit, 'Moors' and Bengali, were lishmen appear to be talking in whispers to each other, as do some not always patronizing in their attitude, nor did they put their of the Indians. The reality was quite different: Clive actually newly acquired skills always to imperialist uses. Even Halhed, 200 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 20 1 who wrote and printed one of the earliest Bengali grammars by a Nevertheless, there had appeared by 1800 an assortment of texts European, is remembered also as the first Englishman to be in- in English-grammars, dictionaries, teaching aids, phrase books, fluenced by Oriental mysticism. The best known was Sir William and translarions of literary works, digests, and compendiums- Jones, the Calcutta Supreme Court judge and founder (in 1784) which, like Rennell's Bengal Atlas, were meant to facilitate colo- of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, who had built a formidable nization and explain the new acquisition both to the Company's reputation as an Oriental scholar even before he made his passage servants in India and to an avid lirerary and scientific community to India. He engaged more comprehensively with Indian civiliza- back home in England. tion than any Englishman has since: orthography, mythology, literature, chronology, chess, the zodiac, botany, music, and natural history are some of the subjects on which he contributed 'Expanding like the petals of young flowers', wrote Calcutta's authoritative articles for the early volumes ofAsiatick Researches. Henry Derozio in a sonnet addyessed to his students at Hindu Described recently as 'one of the greatesr polymaths in history', College, 'I watch the gentle opening of your minds.' What Jones laid the foundation of historical linguistics when, in the nourished these young minds, bringing 'unnumbered kinds I Of 'Third Anniversary Discourse' (1786), he made the assertion thar new perceptions' to them, was colonial education. Sanskrir, Greek, and Latin 'have sprung from a common source, For twenty-five years before the founding of Hindu College in which, perhaps, no longer exists'. He went on to posit the norion 1817, and for nearly twenty years after ir, the nature and pur- ofa common homeland for mankind, from which it had centuries pose of colonial education and the Company's role in it had ago migrated to differenr parc ofheglobe. The Hindus, he said, been furiously debated in London and Calcurta by Britishers and Indians. In 1792, in one of the earliest discussions on the sub- had an immemorial affinity with the old Persians, Ethiopians, and jecr, a director of the East India Company had stated: 'we [have] Egyptians, the Phenicians, Greeks, and Tuscans, the Scythians or just losr America from our folly, in having allowed the establish- Goths, and Celts, the Chinese,/apanese, and Per'er2lzlians;whence, as no ment of schools and colleges . . . [I]t would not do for us to repeat reason appears for believing, that they were a colony from any one of the same act of f~llyin regard to India.' All the same, the folly those nations, or any of those nations from them, we may fairly conclude that they all proceeded from some central country, to was about to be repeated, rhough consensus on the kind of folly investigate which will be the object of my future Discourses . . . it would be was not easy to arrive at. In the debates that followed, the 'Committee of the Protestant Society' rook issue with The Utilitarian philosopher James Mill, perhaps remembering the Clapham sect. Rammohan Ray, who said in 1823 that chis and similar passages, was later ro exclaim that the years spent 'the Sanskrir system of education would be besr calculated to by 'Oriental Jones' in India had been a waste. keep this country in darkness', similarly took up the cudgels Between Jones's universalist ideas of race and Halhed's admi- on behalf of English education for Indians and against the nistrative ruler-ruled paradigm there is a world of difference. 'Orientalist' Horace H. Wilson. Matters came to a head during 200 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 20 1 who wrote and printed one of the earliest Bengali grammars by a Nevertheless, there had appeared by 1800 an assortment of texts European, is remembered also as the first Englishman to be in- in English-grammars, dictionaries, teaching aids, phrase books, fluenced by Oriental mysticism. The best known was Sir William and translarions of literary works, digests, and compendiums- Jones, the Calcutta Supreme Court judge and founder (in 1784) which, like Rennell's Bengal Atlas, were meant to facilitate colo- of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, who had built a formidable nization and explain the new acquisition both to the Company's reputation as an Oriental scholar even before he made his passage servants in India and to an avid lirerary and scientific community to India. He engaged more comprehensively with Indian civiliza- back home in England. tion than any Englishman has since: orthography, mythology, literature, chronology, chess, the zodiac, botany, music, and natural history are some of the subjects on which he contributed 'Expanding like the petals of young flowers', wrote Calcutta's authoritative articles for the early volumes ofAsiatick Researches. Henry Derozio in a sonnet addyessed to his students at Hindu Described recently as 'one of the greatesr polymaths in history', College, 'I watch the gentle opening of your minds.' What Jones laid the foundation of historical linguistics when, in the nourished these young minds, bringing 'unnumbered kinds I Of 'Third Anniversary Discourse' (1786), he made the assertion thar new perceptions' to them, was colonial education. Sanskrir, Greek, and Latin 'have sprung from a common source, For twenty-five years before the founding of Hindu College in which, perhaps, no longer exists'. He went on to posit the norion 1817, and for nearly twenty years after ir, the nature and pur- ofa common homeland for mankind, from which it had centuries pose of colonial education and the Company's role in it had ago migrated to differenr parc ofheglobe. The Hindus, he said, been furiously debated in London and Calcurta by Britishers and Indians. In 1792, in one of the earliest discussions on the sub- had an immemorial affinity with the old Persians, Ethiopians, and jecr, a director of the East India Company had stated: 'we [have] Egyptians, the Phenicians, Greeks, and Tuscans, the Scythians or just losr America from our folly, in having allowed the establish- Goths, and Celts, the Chinese,/apanese, and Per'er2lzlians;whence, as no ment of schools and colleges . . . [I]t would not do for us to repeat reason appears for believing, that they were a colony from any one of the same act of f~llyin regard to India.' All the same, the folly those nations, or any of those nations from them, we may fairly conclude that they all proceeded from some central country, to was about to be repeated, rhough consensus on the kind of folly investigate which will be the object of my future Discourses . . . it would be was not easy to arrive at. In the debates that followed, the 'Committee of the Protestant Society' rook issue with The Utilitarian philosopher James Mill, perhaps remembering the Clapham sect. Rammohan Ray, who said in 1823 that chis and similar passages, was later ro exclaim that the years spent 'the Sanskrir system of education would be besr calculated to by 'Oriental Jones' in India had been a waste. keep this country in darkness', similarly took up the cudgels Between Jones's universalist ideas of race and Halhed's admi- on behalf of English education for Indians and against the nistrative ruler-ruled paradigm there is a world of difference. 'Orientalist' Horace H. Wilson. Matters came to a head during Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 203 the ~~gli~i~t-~rientalistcontroversy of 1835, to be resolved the word 'God.' As a curiosity, 1 put below the first words of my once and for all by Thomas Babington Macaulay's 'Minute on cousin's Vocabulary, retaining the spelling of the English words as they were represented in the Bengali character: Education' of the same year. It said in its most cited part:

Gad : Isvara we must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters Lad : Isvara between us and millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian A'i : A'mi in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, Lu : Tumi and in intellect. &to : Karnlma 'BleddyMacaulay'sminutemen! . . . English-medium misfits . . . Bail : Jamin Square-peg freaks' is how a character in Salman Rushdie's The In the course of time. several East Indian gentlemen of Calcutta Moor? Last Sigh (1995) describes the 'class of persons' it was lent their services to the cause of Native. education. They went to the Macaulay's mission to create. The class had long been in the pro- houses of the wealthy Babus and gave regular instructions to their cess of formation and consisted largely of the new urban Clite, the sons. They received pupils into their own houses, which were turned rising bhadralok population of Calcutta. Many of them were into schools. Under the auspices of these men, the curriculum of immigrants with landed property in the interior districts, but studies was enlarged. To the Spelling Book and the Schoolmaster were were drawn to the city by the promise ofoffice jobs in the expand- added the Tootinamah or the Zles of a Parrot, the Elements ofEnglish Grammar and the Artlbic~nNightslEntertainments. The man who could ing British administration, the key to which was a knowledge read and understand the last mentioned bookwas reckoned, in those of English. For 'the sons of respectable Hindoos' there was days, a prodigy of learning Hindu College, where they acquired, as the Committee on Public Instruction observed in 1830, 'a command of the English langu- One consequence of the changes taking place in Indian society age, and . . . familiarity with its literature and science . . . rarely under colonialism was that Indians had mastered the colonizer's equalled by any schools in Europe'. Of how English was learned language (as the colonizers had mastered theirs) and, going one by aspiring natives at the other end of the educational spectrum, step further, had by the 1820s begun to adopt it as their chosen in the hamlets and villages of Bengal, La1 Behari Day has left a medium of expression. These pioneering works of poetry, fiction, moving account. In the chapter on 'English Education in Cal- drama, travel, and belles-lettres are little read today except by cutta before 1834' in Recollections of My School-days, serialized specialists, but when they were published they were, by the mere in Berzgal Magazine between 1872 and 1876, Day writes: fact of being in English, audacious acts of mimicry and self- assertion. More than this, the themes they touched on and the When I was a little boy I had a sight of one of these Vocabularies, kinds of social issues they engaged with would only be explored which used to be studied by a cousin of mine in my native village at Talpur. The English words were written in the Bengali character, by other Indian literatures several decades later. Krishna Mohan and the volume, agreeably to the custom of the Hindus, began with Banerjea's The Persecuted (1831) might not be good theatre, but 204 Partial Recall the subject of Hindu orthodoxies and the individual's loss of faith A majority of the writers associated with the journals either knew in his religion had not been taken up by any Indian play before it. English or were exposed to the English language, and this conditioned Banerjea, who was 18 years old when he wrote The Persecuted, their world-view and literary style to a great extent. Most ofthem . . . soon afterwards converted to Christianity. He was one of the lead- did not write with literary pretensions; but all of them, consciously ing lights of 'Young Bengal', as Derozio's disciples called them- or unconsciously, took part in the great experiment which brought about a real breakthrough in Indian literature. An awareness of social selves, and founder-editor of The Enquirer (183 1-5). problems, a rational view as opposed to a theocentric universe, a Kylas Chunder Dutt's 'A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the spirit of enquiry, a desire to examine one's past heritage-all these Year 1945' (1835) is about an imaginary armed uprising against appeared in prose rather than in poetry. Here is the historic impor- the British. Insurrection seems a commonplace idea, until we tance of prose in Indian literature. realize that the idea is being expressed for the first time in Indian literature, and would next find expression only in folk songs This magisterial volume cove;s the period 1800-1 9 I0 and is inspired by the events of 1857. It is uncanny that the year of the subtitled 'Western Impact: Indian Response': the metaphor of uprising in Dutt's imagination comes within two years of India's collision, suggesting destruction and debris with signs of survival actual year of Independence; uncanny, too, the coincidence that in its midst, is well chosen. It is one way oflooking at the literature the work should have been published in the same year that Macau- of the nineteenth century. We can also see the period in terms of lay delivered his 'Minute'. In a double irony, the insurgents are hybridization and variety, of mutation and the inevitable divides all urbanized middle-class Indians with the best education colo- brought about by colonialism. nialism could offer, the very class Macaulay had intended as Among the earliest poets to take part in 'the great experiment' 'interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern'. A was Rangalal Banerjee, whose Padmini Upakhyan (1 858), written fable like 'n lournal of Forty-Eight Hours', where the 'language at the request ofa patron who wanted a poem that was not 'in bad of command' is stood on its head and turned into the language taste' or 'lacking in virtuousness', took its story from Col. James of subversion, suggests itself as the imaginative beginnings of Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829). It told of a nation. Hindu valour and heroism in medieval times, during the reign of A second and no less profound consequence of colonial educa- Allauddin Khilji. In the course of the poem, making a switch from tion was the transformation it brought about in the literature looking at the past to examining the present, Banerjee inserted of the Indian languages. To begin with, it introduced Indians to a free translation of some lines of Thomas Campbell-'From life the potentialities of prose, a medium relatively unknown to them. without freedom / Oh, who would not fly? /For one day of Writing about the spread ofjournalism in the 1840s-the decade freedom / Oh, who would not die?'-giving them to a Rajput which saw the launch of Digdarsan and Prabhakar in Marathi, king to speak. The poem, which appeared a year after the rebellion Vartaman Tarangini in Telugu, Tattuabodhini Patrika in Ben- of 1857, ends abruptly on a pro-British note, but its patriotic gali, and Khair Khwah-e Hind in Urdu-Sisir Kumar Das in A message would not have been lost on its readers: for the Muslim History of Indian Literature, volume VIII (1 991), says: Khilji they would simply have read the current dispensation. The 204 Partial Recall the subject of Hindu orthodoxies and the individual's loss of faith A majority of the writers associated with the journals either knew in his religion had not been taken up by any Indian play before it. English or were exposed to the English language, and this conditioned Banerjea, who was 18 years old when he wrote The Persecuted, their world-view and literary style to a great extent. Most ofthem . . . soon afterwards converted to Christianity. He was one of the lead- did not write with literary pretensions; but all of them, consciously ing lights of 'Young Bengal', as Derozio's disciples called them- or unconsciously, took part in the great experiment which brought about a real breakthrough in Indian literature. An awareness of social selves, and founder-editor of The Enquirer (183 1-5). problems, a rational view as opposed to a theocentric universe, a Kylas Chunder Dutt's 'A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the spirit of enquiry, a desire to examine one's past heritage-all these Year 1945' (1835) is about an imaginary armed uprising against appeared in prose rather than in poetry. Here is the historic impor- the British. Insurrection seems a commonplace idea, until we tance of prose in Indian literature. realize that the idea is being expressed for the first time in Indian literature, and would next find expression only in folk songs This magisterial volume cove;s the period 1800-1 9 I0 and is inspired by the events of 1857. It is uncanny that the year of the subtitled 'Western Impact: Indian Response': the metaphor of uprising in Dutt's imagination comes within two years of India's collision, suggesting destruction and debris with signs of survival actual year of Independence; uncanny, too, the coincidence that in its midst, is well chosen. It is one way oflooking at the literature the work should have been published in the same year that Macau- of the nineteenth century. We can also see the period in terms of lay delivered his 'Minute'. In a double irony, the insurgents are hybridization and variety, of mutation and the inevitable divides all urbanized middle-class Indians with the best education colo- brought about by colonialism. nialism could offer, the very class Macaulay had intended as Among the earliest poets to take part in 'the great experiment' 'interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern'. A was Rangalal Banerjee, whose Padmini Upakhyan (1 858), written fable like 'n lournal of Forty-Eight Hours', where the 'language at the request ofa patron who wanted a poem that was not 'in bad of command' is stood on its head and turned into the language taste' or 'lacking in virtuousness', took its story from Col. James of subversion, suggests itself as the imaginative beginnings of Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829). It told of a nation. Hindu valour and heroism in medieval times, during the reign of A second and no less profound consequence of colonial educa- Allauddin Khilji. In the course of the poem, making a switch from tion was the transformation it brought about in the literature looking at the past to examining the present, Banerjee inserted of the Indian languages. To begin with, it introduced Indians to a free translation of some lines of Thomas Campbell-'From life the potentialities of prose, a medium relatively unknown to them. without freedom / Oh, who would not fly? /For one day of Writing about the spread ofjournalism in the 1840s-the decade freedom / Oh, who would not die?'-giving them to a Rajput which saw the launch of Digdarsan and Prabhakar in Marathi, king to speak. The poem, which appeared a year after the rebellion Vartaman Tarangini in Telugu, Tattuabodhini Patrika in Ben- of 1857, ends abruptly on a pro-British note, but its patriotic gali, and Khair Khwah-e Hind in Urdu-Sisir Kumar Das in A message would not have been lost on its readers: for the Muslim History of Indian Literature, volume VIII (1 991), says: Khilji they would simply have read the current dispensation. The 206 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 207 equation seems unfortunate with hindsight, but then that is Bengal Renaissance. It came in the wake of colonialism, and its hindsight. Banerjee was in the employ of the British and could beginnings were the writings ofRammohan Ray. Bengal tasted the not afford to bite the hand that fed him. Bankimchandra exotic fruits of the awakening first, but it rapidly spread to other Chattopadhyaya was also to cunningly locate his nationalist parts of the country, especially in the decades following 1857. novel Ananda Math (1882) in the past, and for precisely the Though made in the context ofEmpire, Lord Curzon's metaphor same reason. that 'We are trying to graft the science of the West on an Eastern Though Padmini Upakhyan was a modest success at the time (a stem' could be a description of the work not just of the poets third reprint came out in 1872), it is today remembered chiefly and dramatists but of the early novelists as well. The novels that for a long preface in which Banerjee unambiguously states reasons were abundantly and cheaply available to them, except for The for importing English elements into his Bengali work. He writes: Vicar of Wakejeld and the novels of Scott, were by Benjamin Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton, ~arie~drelli, ~ilkie ~ollins, and G.W.M. Firstly, many Bengalis who do not know the English language think Reynolds. It was to these minor figures of the Victorian era that there is no superior poetry in that language, and it is important that Indians turned when they crafted their first fictions. they be rid of such delusion. Second, the more poems that are Between 1866 and 1889, during the halcyon days of the Raj, composed in the Bengali language along the purer system of English Nandshankar Mehta in Gujarati, Bankimchandra Chattopa- poetic conventions, the more we shall witness the exit of the immodest, mean body of poetry that currently exists . . . [Translation dhyaya ('the Scott of Bengal') in Bengali, Samuel Vedanayakam by Rosinka Chaudhuri] Pillai in Tamil, M.V. Rohalkar in Marathi, Kandukuri Viresa- lingam Pantulu in Telugu, and 0. Chandu Menon in Malayalam Rangalal Banerjee's contemporary, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, were among several who published novels that, though written in the inventor of blank verse in Bengali, was another who drew on the 'vernaculars', were mediated by English fiction, and some- Tod's Annals-for his play Krishna Kzrmari (1861). However, times had the support of English officials. 'The former education just how completely the insular world of the Indian writer had inspector of our State Mr Russell', wrote Nandshankar Mehta in been infiltrated by its contact with English is shown by what Dutt the introduction to Karan Ghelo (1866), 'has expressed to me his wrote in defence of an earlier play, Sermista (1858), which was desire to see Gujarati books written along the lines of English based on a story from the Mahabharata: 'I am writing for that novels and romances. I have written this novel according to that portion of my countrymen', Dutt said, 'who think as I think, plan.' And Samuel Pillai, who was a district munsif, states in the whose minds have been more or less imbued with Western ideas preface (written in English) of Piratapa Mutaliyar Carittiram, or and modes of thinking and that it is my intention to throw The LiJd. and Adventures of Prathapa Mudaliar (1 879) that in his off the fetters forged for us by a servile admiration for every book, whose object it was 'to supply the want of prose works in thing Sanskrit.' Both Rangalal Banerjee and Michael Madhu- Tamil', he has 'represented the principal personages as ~erfectly sudan Dutt were products of that intellectual and cultural virtuous, in accordance with the opinion of the great English awakening-turmoil would be a better word-known as the moralist Llr Johnson.' 206 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 207 equation seems unfortunate with hindsight, but then that is Bengal Renaissance. It came in the wake of colonialism, and its hindsight. Banerjee was in the employ of the British and could beginnings were the writings ofRammohan Ray. Bengal tasted the not afford to bite the hand that fed him. Bankimchandra exotic fruits of the awakening first, but it rapidly spread to other Chattopadhyaya was also to cunningly locate his nationalist parts of the country, especially in the decades following 1857. novel Ananda Math (1882) in the past, and for precisely the Though made in the context ofEmpire, Lord Curzon's metaphor same reason. that 'We are trying to graft the science of the West on an Eastern Though Padmini Upakhyan was a modest success at the time (a stem' could be a description of the work not just of the poets third reprint came out in 1872), it is today remembered chiefly and dramatists but of the early novelists as well. The novels that for a long preface in which Banerjee unambiguously states reasons were abundantly and cheaply available to them, except for The for importing English elements into his Bengali work. He writes: Vicar of Wakejeld and the novels of Scott, were by Benjamin Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton, ~arie~drelli, ~ilkie ~ollins, and G.W.M. Firstly, many Bengalis who do not know the English language think Reynolds. It was to these minor figures of the Victorian era that there is no superior poetry in that language, and it is important that Indians turned when they crafted their first fictions. they be rid of such delusion. Second, the more poems that are Between 1866 and 1889, during the halcyon days of the Raj, composed in the Bengali language along the purer system of English Nandshankar Mehta in Gujarati, Bankimchandra Chattopa- poetic conventions, the more we shall witness the exit of the immodest, mean body of poetry that currently exists . . . [Translation dhyaya ('the Scott of Bengal') in Bengali, Samuel Vedanayakam by Rosinka Chaudhuri] Pillai in Tamil, M.V. Rohalkar in Marathi, Kandukuri Viresa- lingam Pantulu in Telugu, and 0. Chandu Menon in Malayalam Rangalal Banerjee's contemporary, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, were among several who published novels that, though written in the inventor of blank verse in Bengali, was another who drew on the 'vernaculars', were mediated by English fiction, and some- Tod's Annals-for his play Krishna Kzrmari (1861). However, times had the support of English officials. 'The former education just how completely the insular world of the Indian writer had inspector of our State Mr Russell', wrote Nandshankar Mehta in been infiltrated by its contact with English is shown by what Dutt the introduction to Karan Ghelo (1866), 'has expressed to me his wrote in defence of an earlier play, Sermista (1858), which was desire to see Gujarati books written along the lines of English based on a story from the Mahabharata: 'I am writing for that novels and romances. I have written this novel according to that portion of my countrymen', Dutt said, 'who think as I think, plan.' And Samuel Pillai, who was a district munsif, states in the whose minds have been more or less imbued with Western ideas preface (written in English) of Piratapa Mutaliyar Carittiram, or and modes of thinking and that it is my intention to throw The LiJd. and Adventures of Prathapa Mudaliar (1 879) that in his off the fetters forged for us by a servile admiration for every book, whose object it was 'to supply the want of prose works in thing Sanskrit.' Both Rangalal Banerjee and Michael Madhu- Tamil', he has 'represented the principal personages as ~erfectly sudan Dutt were products of that intellectual and cultural virtuous, in accordance with the opinion of the great English awakening-turmoil would be a better word-known as the moralist Llr Johnson.' 208 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 209

Mehta's and Pillai's are probably the first novels to have been had wondered if the reader was ready for a story 'about the things written in Gujarati andTamil, as is 0.Chandu Menon's Indulekha we experience daily'; the success of Indulekha shows that at least (1889) in Malayalam. In the dedicatory letter to W. Dumergue, the Malayalam reader was. The first printing sold out within three who translated Indulekha 'into the "lingua franca" of the East', months and there were sixty reprints until 1971, a figure which Chandu Menon gives his reasons for writing the novel: would not have surprised Chandu Menon in the least, who said

,- in the preface: First my wife's oft-expressed desire to read in her own language a novel written after the English fashion, and secondly a desire on my Others again asked me, while I was employed on this novel, how I part to try whether I should be able to create a taste amongst my expected to make it a success if I described only the ordinary affairs Malayalee readers, not conversant with English, for that class of of modern life without introducing any element of the supernatural. literature represented in the English language by novels, ofwhich at My answer was this: Before the European style of oil-painting began present they (accustomed as they are to read and admire works of to be known and appreciated in this country, we had-painted in fiction in Malayalam abounding in events and incidents foreign to defiance of all possible existence-pictures of Vishnu as half man nature and often absurd and impossible) have no idea, and. . . to and half lion, pictures of the deity of the chase, pictures of bruteheaded illustrate to my Malayalee brethren the position, power and influence monsters, pictures of the god Krishna with his legs twisted and twined that our Nair women, who are noted for their natural intelligence into postures in which no biped could stand and blowing a cowherd's and beauty, would attain in sociev if they were given a good English horn . . . Such productions used to be highly thought of, and those education; and finally-to contribute my mite towards the improve- who produced them used to be highly remunerated, but now they ment of Malayalam literature which I regret to observe is fast dying are looked upon by many with aversion. A taste has set in for pictures, out by disuse as well as by abuse. whether in oil or watercolours, in which shall be delineated men, beasts, and things according to their true appearance, and the closer Indulekha came out of Menon's attempt at translating Disraeli's that a picture is to nature the greater is the honour paid to the artist. Henrietta Temple (1837), which he abandoned after only a few Just in the same way, if stories composed of incidents true to natural pages, deciding wisely to write his own novel instead. Though life, and attractively and gracefully written, are once introduced, then by degrees the old order of books, filled with the impossible and the thematically a love story with impediments and a happy ending, supernatural, will change, yielding place to the new. and on occasion containing stylistic elements of the folk tale, it is in every other respect radically different from previous works in Taken together, Menon's preface and dedicatory letter read like Malayalam. Set 'in our own times', its events occur in an identifi- a manifesto of Indian literature, one of several that were written able place ('not far away from Native Cochin'), and it is written, in the nineteenth century. Arising out of a colonial situation, they says Menon, 'in the style of Malayalam which I speak at home capture the spirit of a future age. Their key words are 'innovation', with such Sanskrit words as I might use in conversation with an 'intelligence', 'style', 'elegance', 'skill', and the key phrase is 'new educated Malayalee.' Just twenty years earlier the Marathi writer departure'. Decades later, Ezra Pound would echo them in his Naro Sadashiv Risbud, who was an admirer of the Arabian Nights, dictum 'Make it new'. 208 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 209

,- in the preface: First my wife's oft-expressed desire to read in her own language a novel written after the English fashion, and secondly a desire on my Others again asked me, while I was employed on this novel, how I part to try whether I should be able to create a taste amongst my expected to make it a success if I described only the ordinary affairs Malayalee readers, not conversant with English, for that class of of modern life without introducing any element of the supernatural. literature represented in the English language by novels, ofwhich at My answer was this: Before the European style of oil-painting began present they (accustomed as they are to read and admire works of to be known and appreciated in this country, we had-painted in fiction in Malayalam abounding in events and incidents foreign to defiance of all possible existence-pictures of Vishnu as half man nature and often absurd and impossible) have no idea, and. . . to and half lion, pictures of the deity of the chase, pictures of bruteheaded illustrate to my Malayalee brethren the position, power and influence monsters, pictures of the god Krishna with his legs twisted and twined that our Nair women, who are noted for their natural intelligence into postures in which no biped could stand and blowing a cowherd's and beauty, would attain in sociev if they were given a good English horn . . . Such productions used to be highly thought of, and those education; and finally-to contribute my mite towards the improve- who produced them used to be highly remunerated, but now they ment of Malayalam literature which I regret to observe is fast dying are looked upon by many with aversion. A taste has set in for pictures, out by disuse as well as by abuse. whether in oil or watercolours, in which shall be delineated men, beasts, and things according to their true appearance, and the closer Indulekha came out of Menon's attempt at translating Disraeli's that a picture is to nature the greater is the honour paid to the artist. Henrietta Temple (1837), which he abandoned after only a few Just in the same way, if stories composed of incidents true to natural pages, deciding wisely to write his own novel instead. Though life, and attractively and gracefully written, are once introduced, then by degrees the old order of books, filled with the impossible and the thematically a love story with impediments and a happy ending, supernatural, will change, yielding place to the new. and on occasion containing stylistic elements of the folk tale, it is in every other respect radically different from previous works in Taken together, Menon's preface and dedicatory letter read like Malayalam. Set 'in our own times', its events occur in an identifi- a manifesto of Indian literature, one of several that were written able place ('not far away from Native Cochin'), and it is written, in the nineteenth century. Arising out of a colonial situation, they says Menon, 'in the style of Malayalam which I speak at home capture the spirit of a future age. Their key words are 'innovation', with such Sanskrit words as I might use in conversation with an 'intelligence', 'style', 'elegance', 'skill', and the key phrase is 'new educated Malayalee.' Just twenty years earlier the Marathi writer departure'. Decades later, Ezra Pound would echo them in his Naro Sadashiv Risbud, who was an admirer of the Arabian Nights, dictum 'Make it new'. 2 10 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 2 1 1

~h~~~hits poems, plays, and novels appear now to be didactic form of nationalism or with the mother-tongue syndrome, and purposeful, the colonial avant garde had done its job: it had which are often the same thing. In the period after Independence brought a new 'English' imagination-new forms, new situations, the mother-tongue syndrome quickly hardened into nativism, of a new sense of time and a new spatial bustle-to literatures that which there can only be one-pernicious-kind. were 'fast dying out by disuse as well as by abuse'. Rabindranath The good-natured scolding Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya Tagore articulated the same liberating sentiment in My Reminis- gave Romesh Chunder Dutt for not writing in Bengali is an cences (19 14). ' [O]ur hearts', he wrote, 'naturally craved the life- example of the proto-nationalist point of view: 'You will never bringing shock of the passionate emotions expressed in English live by your writing in English . . . Look at others. Your uncles literature. Ours was not the aesthetic enjoyment of literary art, Gobindo Chandra and Shoshi Chandra and Madusudan Dutt but the jubilant welcome of a turbulent wave from a situation were the best educated men in .Hindu College in those days. of stagnation . . .' Gobindo Chandra and Shoshi Chandra's English poems will Chandu Menon, who had risen from sixth clerk to munsif to never live, Madhusudan's Bengali poetry will live so long as the sub-judge in the Madras Presidency, was, in appreciation of his Bengali language will live.' Coming from one who had himself services to the government, conferred the title of Rao Bahadur. abandoned English after writing his first novel in it, the words had But he would have found the second honour that came to him in their effect. Dutt published his first Bengali novel, Bangabijeta, the shape of a certificate from Queen Victoria, Empress of India, in 1874 and went on to write five others. He also continued to 'in recognition of the services rendered by him in the cause of write prolifically in English, his classic work being a two-volume Malayalam literature', not less glory-giving. indictment of British economic policy titled Economic History ofIndia (1902 and 1904).The book made a deep impression on Gandhi, who refers to it in HindSujaraj (1 9 10).Out of his quarrel The exposure to English that colonialism necessitated led some with others came Dutt's writings in English, and out of the quar- Indian writers to discover prose and the realist novel, or blank rel with himself those in Bengali. He described himself as a 'lite- verse and the sonnet, whose grafts they inserted in their tropical rary patriot'. languages and where they have since flourished. Other writers In the nationalist period the posthumous gains ofwriting in the with a similar social background and with the same Macaulayan mother tongue versus writing in English paled into insignificance education reversed the procedure, as it were, and sought to tie and before the more immediate need to forge a national language, wax themselves to an English stem. Though there were no mis- whose absence was felt by all sections of the Indian intelligent- givings about this writing initially-nor indeed about English- sia. 'If you want to draw a nation together there is no force more things started to change in the 1870s. powerful than a common language for all', Bal Gangadhar Tilak The misgivings appear to be on several counts, but all of them, said as early as 1905,addressing a meeting ofthe Nagari Pracharini in the period before Independence, have to do either with some Sabha at Benaras. What this common language was going to Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 2 12 Partial Recall 2 13 to Bhabani Bhattacharya's (1947), Gandhi is be-Hindi, Urdu, or Hindustani-was still not clear, though So Many Hungers Tilak'himself meant Hindi by it. Five years later, joining his voice present in the fiction of the period both in the flesh and, through his ideas, in the spirit. He is present also in more hidden ways. to Tilak's, Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj: 'TO give millions a After reading Gandhi's description in Young India of his en- knowledge of English is to enslave them. 'The foundation that counter with Uka, a sweeper boy, Mulk Raj Anand went back and Macaulay laid of education has enslaved us.' And, 'A universal language for India should be Hindi.' By Hindi Gandhi always rewrote Untouchable (1935). He felt that his narrative, compared meant Hindustani. The term denoted a mongrel language spoken with the simplicity and austerity of Gandhi's, was 'artificially by both Hindus and Muslims across much of northern India concocted'. Subsequently, when he read out the novel to Gandhi which, in 1925, he defined as 'a resultant of Hindi and Urdu, in Sabarmati Ashram, Gandhi advised him 'to cut meretricious neither highly Sanskritised nor highly Persianised nor Arabian- literariness' from it. It's a piece of advice that Ford Madox Ford ised.' Gandhi left the choice of writing this Hindustani in either might have offered a young writef. When Anand rather mawkishly 'Persian or Nagari characters' to individual users of it. wanted to know whether he should continue to write exclusively Issues oflanguage are seldom resolved overnight, and in fact the in English, Gandhi's response was characteristically forthright. Hindi-Hindustani question was being debated, often bitterly, 'The purpose of writing is to communicate, isn't it?' he said. 'If until the 1940s. Eventually, Gandhi's Hindi (or Hindustani), so, say your say in any language that comes to hand.' which had Nehru's complete support, lost out to the Hindi of the Between Gandhi's many-sided opposition to English and his Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, a literary institution established in encouragement ofAnand there is no contradiction. His opposition 1910 to fight for Hindi's cause, and whose early meetings had was not to English but to what it symbolized: political slavery and been attended by nationalist leaders like Sarojini Naidu and cultural degradation. 'I know husbands who are sorry that their C. Rajagopalachari. It was this Hindi, Sanskrit-blest, purged of wives cannot talk to them and their friends in English. I know Urdu elements, and 'written in Devanagari script', which came to families in which English is being made the mother tongue', he be enshrined in the Constitution as 'The official language of had written in Young Zndia in 1921. If English in the nationalist the Union.' period symbolized everything that was wrong with the country, While the battle over language raged, overall it was little more Hindi and the mother tongues suggested everything that was than a sideshow to the freedom movement. If the Indian novel in right. English stood for the colonial past, shortly to be left be- English had its first birth in 1864, when Bankimchandra hind; the 'vernaculars' for the times ahead, soon to unfold at a Chattopadhyaya's Rajmohanj W$e was serialized in The Indian midnight hour made famous by Nehru's 1947 speech and now Field, and its third in the 1980s,when Salman Rushdie's Midnight? done to death by repeated literary invocation. Children and I. Allan Sealy's The Trotter-Nama were published, The Constitution of 1950 that gave Hindi 'official language' its second coming is in the Gandhian nationalist phase which status also provided that English 'shall continue to be used for all began in the 1920s. The factor which is common to these novels the official purposes of the Union' for a period of fifteen years, is Gandhi. From K.S. Venkataramani's Murugan, The Tiller ( 1927) until 1965. It was a provision made at Nehru's insistence and, by Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 2 12 Partial Recall 2 13 to Bhabani Bhattacharya's (1947), Gandhi is be-Hindi, Urdu, or Hindustani-was still not clear, though So Many Hungers Tilak'himself meant Hindi by it. Five years later, joining his voice present in the fiction of the period both in the flesh and, through his ideas, in the spirit. He is present also in more hidden ways. to Tilak's, Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj: 'TO give millions a After reading Gandhi's description in Young India of his en- knowledge of English is to enslave them. 'The foundation that counter with Uka, a sweeper boy, Mulk Raj Anand went back and Macaulay laid of education has enslaved us.' And, 'A universal language for India should be Hindi.' By Hindi Gandhi always rewrote Untouchable (1935). He felt that his narrative, compared meant Hindustani. The term denoted a mongrel language spoken with the simplicity and austerity of Gandhi's, was 'artificially by both Hindus and Muslims across much of northern India concocted'. Subsequently, when he read out the novel to Gandhi which, in 1925, he defined as 'a resultant of Hindi and Urdu, in Sabarmati Ashram, Gandhi advised him 'to cut meretricious neither highly Sanskritised nor highly Persianised nor Arabian- literariness' from it. It's a piece of advice that Ford Madox Ford ised.' Gandhi left the choice of writing this Hindustani in either might have offered a young writef. When Anand rather mawkishly 'Persian or Nagari characters' to individual users of it. wanted to know whether he should continue to write exclusively Issues oflanguage are seldom resolved overnight, and in fact the in English, Gandhi's response was characteristically forthright. Hindi-Hindustani question was being debated, often bitterly, 'The purpose of writing is to communicate, isn't it?' he said. 'If until the 1940s. Eventually, Gandhi's Hindi (or Hindustani), so, say your say in any language that comes to hand.' which had Nehru's complete support, lost out to the Hindi of the Between Gandhi's many-sided opposition to English and his Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, a literary institution established in encouragement ofAnand there is no contradiction. His opposition 1910 to fight for Hindi's cause, and whose early meetings had was not to English but to what it symbolized: political slavery and been attended by nationalist leaders like Sarojini Naidu and cultural degradation. 'I know husbands who are sorry that their C. Rajagopalachari. It was this Hindi, Sanskrit-blest, purged of wives cannot talk to them and their friends in English. I know Urdu elements, and 'written in Devanagari script', which came to families in which English is being made the mother tongue', he be enshrined in the Constitution as 'The official language of had written in Young Zndia in 1921. If English in the nationalist the Union.' period symbolized everything that was wrong with the country, While the battle over language raged, overall it was little more Hindi and the mother tongues suggested everything that was than a sideshow to the freedom movement. If the Indian novel in right. English stood for the colonial past, shortly to be left be- English had its first birth in 1864, when Bankimchandra hind; the 'vernaculars' for the times ahead, soon to unfold at a Chattopadhyaya's Rajmohanj W$e was serialized in The Indian midnight hour made famous by Nehru's 1947 speech and now Field, and its third in the 1980s,when Salman Rushdie's Midnight? done to death by repeated literary invocation. Children and I. Allan Sealy's The Trotter-Nama were published, The Constitution of 1950 that gave Hindi 'official language' its second coming is in the Gandhian nationalist phase which status also provided that English 'shall continue to be used for all began in the 1920s. The factor which is common to these novels the official purposes of the Union' for a period of fifteen years, is Gandhi. From K.S. Venkataramani's Murugan, The Tiller ( 1927) until 1965. It was a provision made at Nehru's insistence and, by 214 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 2 15 the proponents of Hindi, denounced at the time. Speaking before regional language like any other and no longer possessed the pan- the Constituent Assembly on 8 November 1948, when prepara- Indian aura it did during the freedom movement-renewed their tions for drafting the Constitution were getting under way, agitation to remove the language of colonial rule. But now a Nehru, without mentioning Hindi directly (though the audience counter-agitation was launched in the non-Hindi-speaking states was left in no doubt what he meant), said: of the south, thus dividing the country into two camps: an anti- English camp and apro-English one. The north was for abolishing Any attempt to impose a particular form of language on an unwilling English from educational institutions and from the state admi- people has usually met with the strongest opposition and has actu- nistration and for switching over to Hindi; in the south people ally resulted in something the very reverse of what the promoters agitated for the opposite reason: for retaining English and against thought . . . I would beg this House to consider the fact and to realise, imposing Hindi upon them. Since Hindi was now to be the sole if it agrees with me, that the surest way of developing a natural all- India language is not so much to pass resolutions and laws on the 'official language', the people of South India feared they would subject, but to work to that end in other ways. be compelled to learn it-their fear was not unfounded. The Hindi poet Dhoomil has called this period in post-Independence Languages, Nehru had written in a letter from Almora Jail to his Indian history 'The Night of Language': daughter Indira in Santiniketan, were 'desirable and . . . tricky In the eyes of the true butcher, things'. They had to be learnt willingly, and at an early age; they Your Tamil misery had to be wooed. To impose a language on others, more so an And my Bhoipuri gief 'official language', was repugnant to him. Furthermore Nehru was Are one and the same. aware, as early as 1948, ofthe resistance to such an imposition. He In the mouth of that beast, always described Hindi as 'a national language' or as 'one of the Who is one thing in the street national languages', yet he was among the first political leaders to And another in parliament, realize that the southern half of the country, which spoke Telugu, Language is a piece of meat. So quitting the street's darkness, Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam, would never accept Hindi. Come out into the street He touched repeatedly on the dangers inherent in legislating on -Not language but man language, on making it the subject of 'resolutions and laws'. In Has to be put right first- fact he would be preoccupied with these thoughts even in the Come out in the'fourteen months preceding his death in 1964. Tongues that you speak. The 'opposition' to imposing 'a particular form of language on [Translation by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra] an unwilling people', which Nehru had warned against, arrived as if on cue. In the early 196Os, as the year in which English was to In this extract the 'true butcher' and 'hungry beast' is the politician cease 'to be used for all the official purposes of the Union' drew who raises the emotive issue of language for his own selfish ends, near, the enthusiasts of Hindi-forgetting that Hindi was now a leaving the real issues untouched. 214 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 2 15 the proponents of Hindi, denounced at the time. Speaking before regional language like any other and no longer possessed the pan- the Constituent Assembly on 8 November 1948, when prepara- Indian aura it did during the freedom movement-renewed their tions for drafting the Constitution were getting under way, agitation to remove the language of colonial rule. But now a Nehru, without mentioning Hindi directly (though the audience counter-agitation was launched in the non-Hindi-speaking states was left in no doubt what he meant), said: of the south, thus dividing the country into two camps: an anti- English camp and apro-English one. The north was for abolishing Any attempt to impose a particular form of language on an unwilling English from educational institutions and from the state admi- people has usually met with the strongest opposition and has actu- nistration and for switching over to Hindi; in the south people ally resulted in something the very reverse of what the promoters agitated for the opposite reason: for retaining English and against thought . . . I would beg this House to consider the fact and to realise, imposing Hindi upon them. Since Hindi was now to be the sole if it agrees with me, that the surest way of developing a natural all- India language is not so much to pass resolutions and laws on the 'official language', the people of South India feared they would subject, but to work to that end in other ways. be compelled to learn it-their fear was not unfounded. The Hindi poet Dhoomil has called this period in post-Independence Languages, Nehru had written in a letter from Almora Jail to his Indian history 'The Night of Language': daughter Indira in Santiniketan, were 'desirable and . . . tricky In the eyes of the true butcher, things'. They had to be learnt willingly, and at an early age; they Your Tamil misery had to be wooed. To impose a language on others, more so an And my Bhoipuri gief 'official language', was repugnant to him. Furthermore Nehru was Are one and the same. aware, as early as 1948, ofthe resistance to such an imposition. He In the mouth of that beast, always described Hindi as 'a national language' or as 'one of the Who is one thing in the street national languages', yet he was among the first political leaders to And another in parliament, realize that the southern half of the country, which spoke Telugu, Language is a piece of meat. So quitting the street's darkness, Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam, would never accept Hindi. Come out into the street He touched repeatedly on the dangers inherent in legislating on -Not language but man language, on making it the subject of 'resolutions and laws'. In Has to be put right first- fact he would be preoccupied with these thoughts even in the Come out in the'fourteen months preceding his death in 1964. Tongues that you speak. The 'opposition' to imposing 'a particular form of language on [Translation by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra] an unwilling people', which Nehru had warned against, arrived as if on cue. In the early 196Os, as the year in which English was to In this extract the 'true butcher' and 'hungry beast' is the politician cease 'to be used for all the official purposes of the Union' drew who raises the emotive issue of language for his own selfish ends, near, the enthusiasts of Hindi-forgetting that Hindi was now a leaving the real issues untouched. 216 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 2 17

The Official Language Bill was brought before parliament in edited by Stephen Spender and Donald Hall, is on Indian poetry 1963 and passed the same year, extending the constitutional in English, but the attitude behind it is not confined to verse of English beyond the fifteen-year period. It reassured alone. It begins: non-Hindi speakers that English would continue to be used in their states so long as they did not themselves want a change, nor It may seem surprising that Indians, who have always had a firm would a knowledge of Hindi be compulsorily required of any- poetic tradition in their own languages, should ever have tried to one seeking employment in the central government. Tamil Nadu write verse in English. That they did so, was the outcome of the anglomania which seized some upper-class Indians in the early years greeted the news by eliminating the teaching of Hindi from its of British rule. Sons (and sometimes daughters) were sent to England secondary schools, Uttar Pradesh having already adopted a similar even before they had reached teen-age, and there they spent all their measure against English. formative years. Thus it was that English became the poetic vehicle In the debate on the bill, speaking with a passion that came to of a number of gifted Indians . .*. be expected of him when the subject was language, Nehru explained why he was pressing for retaining English in India. The And it famously concludes: British invasion, he said, had 'administered a shock' to our people, but the shock had its positive side. Our languages, which like As late as 1937, Yeats reminded Indian writers that 'no man can our lives had become 'static', were made 'more dynamic' through think or write with music and vigour except in his mother-tongue'; their contact with English. English would 'serve as a vitaliser to to the great majority of Indians this admonition was unnecessary, but the intrepid few who left it unheeded do not yet realise that our languages' in the future, as it had in the past. Succeeding 'Indo-Anglian' poetry is a blind alley, lined with curio shops, lead- events, both linguistic and literary, have proved Nehru right. ing nowhere. Nehru had succeeded in stopping the clock which was ticking away for English. It is all the more paradoxical, therefore, that The quote from Yeats is inaccurate, and the date, 1937, is in- just when the threat seemed to lift and the future of English in correct. Bose was obviously quoting from memory. What is India looked secure, Indian literature in English came to be seen more important, though, is that the statement hit home and a as a historical aberration and a literary dead-end. The best-known response was delivered six years later in the form of a 600-page statement of this point of view was, unfortunately, penned by compilation, by far the largest work of its kind yet, called Modern Buddhadeva Bose, who, apart from being one ofthe finest Bengali Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and Credo (1969), edited poets of the post-Tagore generation, wrote some excellent essays by I? La1 and published by Writers Workshop, Calcutta, a vanity in English and whose translations of modern Bengali poetry publishing house run by La1 himself. (Jibanananda Das, Amiya Chakravarty, Samar Sen, BenoyMajum- La1 had decided to speak on behalf of the 'Indo-Anglians', or dar) are unsurpassed even today. Bose's entry in the Concise maybe he was stung by Bose's description of him as a 'publisher Encyclopaedia of English and American Poets and Poetry (1963), and publicist', a 'representative figure' of 'a new group who are 2 18 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 2 19 assiduously courting the Muse of Albion'. At any rate, he sent that they should. I think the real question is whether they can. And cyclostyled copies of Bose's entry to seventy-five poets, along with if they can, they will. (A.K. Ramanujan) a questionnaire. Among the questions the recipients had to The circumstances that led me to write in English are simple-I answer were: 'What are the circumstances that led to your using belong to that unfortunate minority, anglomaniacs all, who even the English language for the purpose of writing poetry?' 'What puked in English when three weeks old. My umbilical cord was are your views on the "Indo-Anglian" background?' and 'Do you anglicised. (Lawrence Bantleman) think English is one of the Indian languages?'The sixth question- there were seven in all-referred specifically to Sri Aurobindo, The replies to the questionnaire, however, take up only a small whom Bose had praised by saying, 'In authenticity of [English] part of the book's 600 pages. The bulk of it consists of the work diction and feeling Sri Aurobindo far out-shines the others . . .' of 132 poets, arranged alphabetically from Alford to Yousufzaie. The questionnaire quoted this and added archly: 'Your comments, There are also biographical no& and, in most cases, photo- please.' Some of the replies and comments are given below: graphs. One poet is disguised as a common North Indian labourer; another, cigarette in hand, strikes the pose of a matinee idol. Both I thought we have had more than enough of whether or no English are bearded. La1 provides a long and somewhat urgent introduction. should be used in India as a means of communication-creative The language question was a 1960s issue in India and it has communication included. Mr. Bose might be irrelevant since English is there and a work of erudition or art is acceptable or not acceptable largely been forgotten. Since then, English has crept back into on merit. And there are fairly accurate instruments of assessing the northern states, but, with state governments washing their merit regardless of a writer's nationality, his ancestry, personal or hands off it, public demand is met by private initiative. 'English- group stress or history, or his ethnic and cultural credits and debits. medium' nursery schools with names like Little Angles, Jesus- (G.Lr.Desani) Marry, and Tinny Tots (the last being the name of one such school I . . . agree that Indo-Anglian poetry is lined with curio shops, and I in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, 1993) are to be found in many am amused that Mr. Bose professes an admiration for the crassest of parts of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and them all, Sri Aurobindo. (Nissim Ezekiel) Bihar, and it would be safe to assume that the children who

I do believe that the tradition back of me is not of Rabindranath attend them are learning English by methods not too different Tagore or Aurobindo. I would rather say that my background is Auden from those by which La1 Behari Day's cousin learnt his 170 years and MacNeice, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Sarojini ago. On the other hand, the South imbibes whatever Hindi it Naidu and Toru Dutt never excited me in the sense that The Waste does by watching Bollywood films and television serials. Land and The Glass Menagerie did. (Srinivas Rayaprol) While there has largely been a lull on the language front, the

I do not quite know how to reply to your questions because I have picket from which Bose fired his blunderbuss has seldom been really no strong opinions on Indians writing in English. Buddhadeva inactive. In fact it has become the Siachen of Indian literature. In Bose has strong opinions on why they should not; you are persuaded 'Does Language Matter?', a piece which appeared in the Times 2 18 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 2 19 assiduously courting the Muse of Albion'. At any rate, he sent that they should. I think the real question is whether they can. And cyclostyled copies of Bose's entry to seventy-five poets, along with if they can, they will. (A.K. Ramanujan) a questionnaire. Among the questions the recipients had to The circumstances that led me to write in English are simple-I answer were: 'What are the circumstances that led to your using belong to that unfortunate minority, anglomaniacs all, who even the English language for the purpose of writing poetry?' 'What puked in English when three weeks old. My umbilical cord was are your views on the "Indo-Anglian" background?' and 'Do you anglicised. (Lawrence Bantleman) think English is one of the Indian languages?'The sixth question- there were seven in all-referred specifically to Sri Aurobindo, The replies to the questionnaire, however, take up only a small whom Bose had praised by saying, 'In authenticity of [English] part of the book's 600 pages. The bulk of it consists of the work diction and feeling Sri Aurobindo far out-shines the others . . .' of 132 poets, arranged alphabetically from Alford to Yousufzaie. The questionnaire quoted this and added archly: 'Your comments, There are also biographical no& and, in most cases, photo- please.' Some of the replies and comments are given below: graphs. One poet is disguised as a common North Indian labourer; another, cigarette in hand, strikes the pose of a matinee idol. Both I thought we have had more than enough of whether or no English are bearded. La1 provides a long and somewhat urgent introduction. should be used in India as a means of communication-creative The language question was a 1960s issue in India and it has communication included. Mr. Bose might be irrelevant since English is there and a work of erudition or art is acceptable or not acceptable largely been forgotten. Since then, English has crept back into on merit. And there are fairly accurate instruments of assessing the northern states, but, with state governments washing their merit regardless of a writer's nationality, his ancestry, personal or hands off it, public demand is met by private initiative. 'English- group stress or history, or his ethnic and cultural credits and debits. medium' nursery schools with names like Little Angles, Jesus- (G.Lr.Desani) Marry, and Tinny Tots (the last being the name of one such school I . . . agree that Indo-Anglian poetry is lined with curio shops, and I in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, 1993) are to be found in many am amused that Mr. Bose professes an admiration for the crassest of parts of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and them all, Sri Aurobindo. (Nissim Ezekiel) Bihar, and it would be safe to assume that the children who

of India of 26 March 1988, Sham Lal, a former editor of the To be precise, the mode of operation of English as a supra-language paper, wrote: in India has been cultural-written-formal rather than social-oral- conversational in the national linguistic context. Such a written variety ~f the nationalists' dream of developing Hindi as the link language which has not emerged from the soil is highly detrimental to creative has gone sour, so has the westernizers' dream of domesticating use . . . The English language has become thus a pathetic necessity English . . . Mr. Raja Rao's brave talk that 'we shall have the English for post-Independence Indians, the widows of the British Empire, language with us and amongst us, and not as guest or friend, but as and it is retained in India mainly because it maintains what can be one of our own, of our caste, our creed, our sect and of our tradition' called 'equality of disadvantage' among Indians of different mother- was a bit ofblarney. Curiously, he also said that English 'is the language tongues. It survives on the impoverishment resulting from multilingu- of our intellectual make-up and not of our emotional make-up'. But alism encouraged by our tolerant national culture; and by occupying can a person reserve the nuances of his thought and feeling for rwo the position of a supra-language, it aggravates this impoverishment separate languages without developing a split personality? further. . Sham La1 ends by saying: 'There was a time when a British writer Whereas every word in the mother-tongue presents its own geology, jeeringly described Indian writing in English as "Matthew Arnold the words in a foreign language offer insipid solidarity to the writer's in a sari" and an Indian professor hastened to correct him and competence. A foreign language thus suppresses the natural original- ity of Indian writers in English, enforcing on the whole tribe the said it would be more appropriate to compare it to a "Shakuntala fine art of parrotry. It is worth noting in this context that the cases of in skirts".' Among those who have joined Buddhadeva Bose and Indians praising Indians' command over English are more frequent Sham La1 behind the sandbag of the mother tongue is Bhal- than those of Englishmen making patronising understatements about chandra Nemade, Tagore Professor of Comparative Literature at Indians' use of English. This smacks of the Crusoe-Friday relation- the University of Bombay and well known as a Marathi novelist. ship, since an Indian nightingale does not receive even the status of Given below are three extracts from his Indo-Anglian Writings: a crow in the history of English literature. Two Lectures (199 1): The nightingale reference is to Sarojini Naidu, whom Gandhi What is understood today as 'Indo-Anglian Writing' is one of the called the 'Nightingale of India'. latest nomenclatures of a body of books, hyphenisedly christened by There is the odd similarity between what Bose said in 1963 and university academicians. The writer of this 'Inglish' species of Indian what Nemade said in 1991. There are also profound differences, literary production is one who is Indian by birth or association and reflecting the change in the political climate from Nehru's time who, for a variety of reasons best known to himself, writes not in his to our own. Nemade, with passionate intensity, perceives cultures mother tongue, but in English . . . Since India is a country fabulous as being either strong, unitary, and male, or weak, diverse, and in all kinds of idiosyncrasies, it is futile to question the existence of this writing and to be fair to it, let us accept it as an abnormal case female. Weak cultures allow for a high degree of tolerance, but of a historical development, even as wryly as Saros Cowasjee, who the more tolerance they show the more weak and impoverished treats it like a disease: 'this is not a healthy trend, but it is there', she they become. It is a vicious circle, and one in which 'our tolerant [sic]says. I national culture' is now trapped. A weak culture, nevertheless, 222 Partial Recall needs to be held together, howsoever loosely; just as a houseful of whole societies and situations afresh. The state of our own society widows needs to have a man around, if only to douse the flames may never have seemed so awful as it does now. when the widows set each other ablaze. In the case of a weak Let it not be said in the future that by failing to find alternatives to culture like India's, the cause of whose weakness is linguistic the . . . regressive parochialism of our writers, we allowed it to be- diversity, the presence of a dominating 'supra-language' is 'a come too awful for words. ('The New India, The New Media and pathetic necessity'. English performs the 'supra-language' function, Literature', The Indian I?E.N., Jan.-Feb. 1985) but at the same time, because of the position it occupies, it im- Compared with Nemade's extreme views, Bose's little sneer poverishes the mother tongues further. Nemade's view of langu- ('courting the Muse of Albion') and the caricature Sham La1 age and Indian society is everything that Nehru's was not. alludes to ('Shakuntala in skirts') seem like friendly gestures. Their Nemade had expressed similar views earlier, and they were jibes are a part of the history of colonial humour which goes even more immoderate. In a special issue ofNew Quest (May-June back to the nineteenth century, &hen the figure of the Bengali 1984) on nativism he wrote: babu was lampooned in any number of poems, songs, and panto- A most ridiculous trend . . . is the way some of our writers strive to mimes, and in the popular art of Battala wood engravings and become 'national' and even 'international' by getting their work Kalighat paintings. Here is the babu in Mokshodayani Mukho- translated into English. This has become a spurious means of building padhyaya's wholly unforgiving send-up: literary reputations. It is time we realised the fact that beyond our Alas, there goes our Bengali babu! own 'language group' all that we do smacks of mediocrity. Like the He slaves away from ten till four, sadhus camping in the Ram Leela ground in Delhi in G.V. Desani's Carrying his servitude like a pedlar's wares. AllAbout H. Hatterr, our writers and politicians seem to carry the A lawyer or magistrate, or perhaps a schoolmaster, nameboards: 'All-India Sadhu' and 'International Sadhu' and so on. A subjudge, clerk, or overseer: Nemade's opinions should have caused an uproar but didn't, The bigger the job, the greater his and except for Adil Jussawalla and Vilas Sarang, nobody else The babu thinks he's walking on air. took any notice of them. Quoting him on nativism, Jussawalla Red in the face from the day's hard labour, points out that Nemade defines nativism 'in Hindu revivalist He downs pegs of whiskey to relax when he's home. He's transported with pride at the thought of his rank- terms', a phrase which encapsulates Nemade's cultural and politi- But faced with a sahib he trembles in fear! cal positions. Jussawalla's concluding sentences, in more ways Then he's obsequious, he mouths English phrases, than one, read like a prophecy: His own tongue disgusts him, he heaps it with curses. I fear the qualities of racist arrogance, self-centredness and isolationism The babu's learned Englisll, he swells with conceit are very much there in Nemade's concept of Nativism. If they don't And goes off in haste to deliver a speech. doom the country to extinction, they may well doom the growth of He flounders while speaking, and stumbles and stutters, a vital, imaginative and critical literature. Words are far from dead. Bur he's speaking in EngIisll: you must come and hear. In the best of literature, they free imprisoned visions and make us see 222 Partial Recall needs to be held together, howsoever loosely; just as a houseful of whole societies and situations afresh. The state of our own society widows needs to have a man around, if only to douse the flames may never have seemed so awful as it does now. when the widows set each other ablaze. In the case of a weak Let it not be said in the future that by failing to find alternatives to culture like India's, the cause of whose weakness is linguistic the . . . regressive parochialism of our writers, we allowed it to be- diversity, the presence of a dominating 'supra-language' is 'a come too awful for words. ('The New India, The New Media and pathetic necessity'. English performs the 'supra-language' function, Literature', The Indian I?E.N., Jan.-Feb. 1985) but at the same time, because of the position it occupies, it im- Compared with Nemade's extreme views, Bose's little sneer poverishes the mother tongues further. Nemade's view of langu- ('courting the Muse of Albion') and the caricature Sham La1 age and Indian society is everything that Nehru's was not. alludes to ('Shakuntala in skirts') seem like friendly gestures. Their Nemade had expressed similar views earlier, and they were jibes are a part of the history of colonial humour which goes even more immoderate. In a special issue ofNew Quest (May-June back to the nineteenth century, &hen the figure of the Bengali 1984) on nativism he wrote: babu was lampooned in any number of poems, songs, and panto- A most ridiculous trend . . . is the way some of our writers strive to mimes, and in the popular art of Battala wood engravings and become 'national' and even 'international' by getting their work Kalighat paintings. Here is the babu in Mokshodayani Mukho- translated into English. This has become a spurious means of building padhyaya's wholly unforgiving send-up: literary reputations. It is time we realised the fact that beyond our Alas, there goes our Bengali babu! own 'language group' all that we do smacks of mediocrity. Like the He slaves away from ten till four, sadhus camping in the Ram Leela ground in Delhi in G.V. Desani's Carrying his servitude like a pedlar's wares. AllAbout H. Hatterr, our writers and politicians seem to carry the A lawyer or magistrate, or perhaps a schoolmaster, nameboards: 'All-India Sadhu' and 'International Sadhu' and so on. A subjudge, clerk, or overseer: Nemade's opinions should have caused an uproar but didn't, The bigger the job, the greater his and except for Adil Jussawalla and Vilas Sarang, nobody else The babu thinks he's walking on air. took any notice of them. Quoting him on nativism, Jussawalla Red in the face from the day's hard labour, points out that Nemade defines nativism 'in Hindu revivalist He downs pegs of whiskey to relax when he's home. He's transported with pride at the thought of his rank- terms', a phrase which encapsulates Nemade's cultural and politi- But faced with a sahib he trembles in fear! cal positions. Jussawalla's concluding sentences, in more ways Then he's obsequious, he mouths English phrases, than one, read like a prophecy: His own tongue disgusts him, he heaps it with curses. I fear the qualities of racist arrogance, self-centredness and isolationism The babu's learned Englisll, he swells with conceit are very much there in Nemade's concept of Nativism. If they don't And goes off in haste to deliver a speech. doom the country to extinction, they may well doom the growth of He flounders while speaking, and stumbles and stutters, a vital, imaginative and critical literature. Words are far from dead. Bur he's speaking in EngIisll: you must come and hear. In the best of literature, they free imprisoned visions and make us see 224 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 225

The babu speaks a patter of Bengali and English But he berates the English with all his heart. These sports are but nocturnal; wiping his mouth, in the morning The animosity towards Indian literature in English stems in The babu is respectful and sober again. large measure from the animosity towards the social class English [Translation by Supriya Chaudhuri] has come to be identified with: a narrow, well-entrenched, metropolitan-based ruling tlite that has dominated Indian life for the 'Bangali Babu' appears in Women Writing in India, volume I past fifty and more years. But literature as a category is inclusive (199 I), edited by SusieTharu and K. Lalita. It was written around rather than exclusive. It is more complex, less homogeneous, than 1880, the decade in which Mokshodayani Mukhopadhyaya's a social group, and cannot always be made coextensive with it. younger contemporary, Rudyard Kipling, who had a masterful While it is true that many who write in English in India belong to ear for such things, was listening to patter of a quite different sort: the metropolitan tlite, it is also trGe that many who write at all, 'part English, part Portuguese, and part Native', it was the speech irrespective of language, belong to a privileged stratum. Growing of 'the Borderline folk'. The Borderline, says Kipling in 'His up in small mofussil towns, they have attended local schools Chance in Life', an early story, is and their early education has been in an Indian language. These where the last drop of White blood ends and the full tide of Black languages (Oriya, Marathi, Kannada) have, at times, been vehicles sets in. It would be easier to talk to a new-made Duchess on the spur of creative expression for them as much as English. The Mysore- of the moment than to the Borderline folk without violating some of b0rnA.K. Ramanujan, whose mother tongue wasTamil, published their conventions or hurting their feelings. The Black and the White his first collection of English poems, The Striders, in 1966, and mix very quaintly in their ways . . . One of these days, this people- three years later followed it with his first collection in Kannada. understand they are far lower than the class whence Derozio, the And Ramanujan's is by no means an isolated case. Arun Kolatkar's man who imitated Byron, sprung-will turn out a writer or a poet; poems in Marathi and English started appearing in journals in the and then we shall know how they live and what they feel. In the meantime, any stories about them cannot be absolutely correct in 1950s, and he has continued to publish, like Dilip Chitre, in fact or inference. both languages since. Not all Indian writers in English write in two languages of course, but they are nevertheless drawn from a What Mukhopadhyaya's conceited babu and Kipling's mixed bilingual tlite which is far from exclusively metropolitan. 'Borderline folk' were to the society of their day, the writer in Writing in two languagespan affliction not confined to English is to India's post-Independence literary space. An poets-is one of several ways in which bilingualism expresses 'anglomaniac' with a 'split-personality', he is even now looked itself. Another is translation, especially translation by authors of upon as a half-caste whose mixed literary parentage, 'part Eng- their own work from an Indian language into English. Though the lish. . . and part Native', is embodied, permanently, in the hy- nature of these translations (with the exception of Tagore's) and phenated phrase 'Indo-Anglian'. the necessity of doing them have rarely been commented on, they 226 Partial Recall Towards a History of Irzdian Literature of English 227 have had a long history that goes back to Michael Madhusudan For most of my adult life, my stream of consciousness has flowed in Dutt. In recent decades, among those who have made transla- English, and it is in a way odd that, when 1 sit down to write, I tions of their work into English are the Malayalam novelist O.V. switch to thinking in Marathi. My conscious mind may function through English, but my unconscious is rooted in Marathi; and to Vijayan and the Kannada playwright Girish Karnad, and their draw upon the resources of my unconscious, I must go through the translations have been widely acclaimed. However, for an insider's initial rites of passage in my native tongue. However, the conscious view ofwhat negotiating a text in two languages involves, and to part of my mind being situated in English, it still remains necessary know what the pleasures and pitfalls of 'dual citizenship in the to recreate the text in English. To write first in Marathi, then re-do world of letters' are, we have to go to Vilas Sarang. the text in English, is thus a means of reconciling the two halves of In 'Confessions of a Marathi Writer' (World Literature Today, my divided psyche. Spring 1994), Sarang says that the first full-length book in Eng- The authors Sarang admires are Kafka, Hemingway, Camus, lish he read was Tim Corbett's The Marl-eatirzg Leopard of Rudra- and Beckett, and he sees himself as belonging, in a modest way, to prayag, at age sixteen. Before this, he read books only in Marathi. the 'international modernist tradition'. 'Marathi literature is so Sarang's 'first mature story' was written soon after, in 1963, when hopelessly mired in the stick-in-the-mud middle-class ethos and he was an MA student at Bombay University. 'As it happens', he reflexes', he says, 'that, from the beginning, I refused to have any confesses, 'I wrote this story in English.' When the Marathi truck with the sensibility it represented. The narrow, and subtly magazine Abhiruchi wanted the story, he offered to make 'a hasty caste-marked, paths of Marathi literature saw as something crib, to my mind unsatisfactory and lacking the style of the I to avoid at any cost; a largely self-invented international tradi- original1. It was thus published in Marathi first in 1965. The tion offered a liberating route to self-realization.' Still, there English version of the story, 'Flies', had to wait until 1981, when were Marathi writers associated with the Navakatha (New Story) it appeared in London Magazine. 'As by then', Sarang writes, 'my movement in the 1950s, like Gangadhar Gadgil, Vyankatesh other, later stories written in Marathi had appeared in English Madplkar, and Aravind Gokhale, whom Sarang read avidly as translations, I allowed this story to appear in LM as "Trans- when young, and he is quick to acknowledge that if he has been lated from the Marathi", and that is how it stands in my 1990 able to 'achieve some distinction as a short-story writer', it's collection, Fair Tree of the Void (Penguin India). Well, there's a because he 'stand [s] on their shoulders'. "Marathi" writer for you.' Coming to bilingualism, by which he means having an equally But even those stories that he first wrote in Marathi 'are often strong allegiance to two languages and laying claim to two lite- covertly English'. 'As a matter of fact,' he says, 'I regard the English rary traditions, Sarang describes the 'tricky situation' bilingualism versions of my stories as the definitive text, and the "originaln can put the Indian writer in: Marathi as only a stage toward the final casting.' Why Sarang has bothered to write in Marathi at all is a question he answers Marathi readers have frequently complained that my Marathi sounds himself: as though it were translated from English, and I daresay they are not 226 Partial Recall Towards a History of Irzdian Literature of English 227 have had a long history that goes back to Michael Madhusudan For most of my adult life, my stream of consciousness has flowed in Dutt. In recent decades, among those who have made transla- English, and it is in a way odd that, when 1 sit down to write, I tions of their work into English are the Malayalam novelist O.V. switch to thinking in Marathi. My conscious mind may function through English, but my unconscious is rooted in Marathi; and to Vijayan and the Kannada playwright Girish Karnad, and their draw upon the resources of my unconscious, I must go through the translations have been widely acclaimed. However, for an insider's initial rites of passage in my native tongue. However, the conscious view ofwhat negotiating a text in two languages involves, and to part of my mind being situated in English, it still remains necessary know what the pleasures and pitfalls of 'dual citizenship in the to recreate the text in English. To write first in Marathi, then re-do world of letters' are, we have to go to Vilas Sarang. the text in English, is thus a means of reconciling the two halves of In 'Confessions of a Marathi Writer' (World Literature Today, my divided psyche. Spring 1994), Sarang says that the first full-length book in Eng- The authors Sarang admires are Kafka, Hemingway, Camus, lish he read was Tim Corbett's The Marl-eatirzg Leopard of Rudra- and Beckett, and he sees himself as belonging, in a modest way, to prayag, at age sixteen. Before this, he read books only in Marathi. the 'international modernist tradition'. 'Marathi literature is so Sarang's 'first mature story' was written soon after, in 1963, when hopelessly mired in the stick-in-the-mud middle-class ethos and he was an MA student at Bombay University. 'As it happens', he reflexes', he says, 'that, from the beginning, I refused to have any confesses, 'I wrote this story in English.' When the Marathi truck with the sensibility it represented. The narrow, and subtly magazine Abhiruchi wanted the story, he offered to make 'a hasty caste-marked, paths of Marathi literature saw as something crib, to my mind unsatisfactory and lacking the style of the I to avoid at any cost; a largely self-invented international tradi- original1. It was thus published in Marathi first in 1965. The tion offered a liberating route to self-realization.' Still, there English version of the story, 'Flies', had to wait until 1981, when were Marathi writers associated with the Navakatha (New Story) it appeared in London Magazine. 'As by then', Sarang writes, 'my movement in the 1950s, like Gangadhar Gadgil, Vyankatesh other, later stories written in Marathi had appeared in English Madplkar, and Aravind Gokhale, whom Sarang read avidly as translations, I allowed this story to appear in LM as "Trans- when young, and he is quick to acknowledge that if he has been lated from the Marathi", and that is how it stands in my 1990 able to 'achieve some distinction as a short-story writer', it's collection, Fair Tree of the Void (Penguin India). Well, there's a because he 'stand [s] on their shoulders'. "Marathi" writer for you.' Coming to bilingualism, by which he means having an equally But even those stories that he first wrote in Marathi 'are often strong allegiance to two languages and laying claim to two lite- covertly English'. 'As a matter of fact,' he says, 'I regard the English rary traditions, Sarang describes the 'tricky situation' bilingualism versions of my stories as the definitive text, and the "originaln can put the Indian writer in: Marathi as only a stage toward the final casting.' Why Sarang has bothered to write in Marathi at all is a question he answers Marathi readers have frequently complained that my Marathi sounds himself: as though it were translated from English, and I daresay they are not 228 Partial Recall Towards a History of lrzdian Literature of English 229

entirely off the mark. At the same time, whenever I have written literature '[a] kind of cultural fundamentalism, closely allied to its directly in English, there sometimes came the complaint that it did religious variety'. 'As I remarked in an article published in Indian not sound quite English. . . It can be the unenviable fate of the Literature in 1992', he says, ' "The Marathi literary world today bilingual writer to be turned away from both houses he considers his resembles a little pond crowded with frogs croaking at each own. People everywhere have a very possessive and exclusive attitude other in self-satisfaction." ' to what they consider their language. Given this 'regressive mood', Sarang is not too surprised by The early 1960s, according to Sarang, was 'probably one of the 'the rise of a phenomenon called nativism (deshiuad)'. What does best and liveliest periods in Marathi literary history'. The first surprise him, though, is that 'its leader is Bhalchandra Nemade, generation of post-Independence writers, brimming with confi- the one-time avant-garde, tradition-breaking author of Kosla, dence and possessing 'a new sense of identity' had come to with the practitioners of"rura1 literature" as its principal followers. maturity. Short-lived little magazines, often run by the writers They have accused writers such as'chitre, Kolatkar, and myself of themselves, mushroomed everywhere, and when they closed being "slaves of Western culture".' Sarang is not one to pull his down new ones took their place. 'Avant-gardism, experimentation, punches. He replies to the slavery charge by calling nativism 'a and creative crankiness were in vogue. The air was full of excite- retrograde, hidebound, and perniciously limiting movement. It ment.' Sarang's Marathi contemporaries were Bhalchandra is a movement by people who are afraid of the world, who want Nemade, Arun Kolatkar, and Dilip Chitre, and in 'Confessions' to retreat into their little hole in the dirtheap.' he mentions each of them in turn. He describes Nemade's Kosh Sarang's essay reiterates many of the ideas and issues we have (The Cocoon), a section of which he translated for Adil Jussa- met with before, in Derozio and Young Bengal, in Rangalal walla's pathbreaking anthology New Writing in India (1974), as a Banerjee and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, in Chandu Menon, novel 'that overnight changed the face of Marathi fiction and Tagore, and Nehru. Sham La1 asked if one can write in 'two sepa- its style', and calls it 'the finest symbol of the brash and daring rate languages without developing a split personality', and Sarang creativity of that period'. Equally 'brash and daring' were Kolatkar shows not only that one can, but that the condition of 'split' is and Chitre, who wrote 'a poetry informed simultaneously by the what keeps a literature in good shape, keeps it from becoming a work of medieval Marathi poet-saints and the French symbolists 'little hole in the dirtheap'. Equally important for us, Sarang and their modernist heirs'. 'I count myselffortunate', says Sarang, touches on something which has always been known but is sel- 'that I began publishing my work at a time like this.' dom remarked on, much less examined: the presence of the Indian But that time is past. When Sarang looks back on it and what languages in Indian literatyworks in English, and the corresponding it promised, it's as though on a golden age. Those who were once presence in Indian-language texts of English. 'We are all instinct- the 'champions ofmodernism and innovation'-Kolatkar, Chitre, ively bilingual', Raja Rao said in the foreword to Kanthapura and Sarang himself-'seem like lone rangers in an unconducive, (1938). This instinctive bilingualism is what umbilically ties the hostile environment.' In place of the 'experimentation and creat- writing done in English to the other Indian literatures. ive crankiness' of the early 196Os, there is at work in Marathi In the resistance to Indian writing in English, however, there 230 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 23 1 has never been any let-up. In each decade new ways are found to In a way my journey to London was instructive. 'Why London?' I marginalize it. If in the 1960s it was likened to 'a blind alley . . . am sonletimes asked. I took my script there because I liked the way the British produced books, and I did not like the way books were leading no-where', in the 1990s it was seen as a phenomenon produced here. (As it happened the Americans [Knopf] produced a occurring not here, in India, but abroad. 'Writing for export' is handsome first edition, and the British [Penguin] a shoddy offprint.) how the Kannada novelist U.R. Anantha Murthy, a former But there would have been a colonial component to my anxiety. If chairman of the Sahitya Akademi (the National Aczdemy of so, I got my deserts. Not one British newspaper reviewed the book Letten), reacted on the Amul India Show to the success of Arun- when it appeared. Its discovery was an Indian critical undertaking; dhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997). The feeling that Indian papers and journals, Indian reviewers made its reputation. I readers of such novels are mainly in the West and that the writing am making a political, but I hope not chauvinistic, point. What my own experience taught me was that an English literary culture was is essentially being done for them is now common, so much so coming of age here-and I had been blind to it. that any attention a work receives is put down to the changed marketplace, to the large advance a novel occasionally fetches, to The marketplace is in any case a ficltle thing. In the TLS of 8 the publicity it generates in the Indian media. In the words of August 1997, Amit Chaudhuri takes, as a writer should, a long the historian Sumit Sarkar, "'Indo-Anglian" writing had to wait view of the matter and sounds a cautionary note. 'We are, appa- for postcolonial times to become a significant literary genre, rently', he says, under conditions of intensified globalization.' If this is an insight into the conditions that have recently made Indian writing in the midst of some sort of resurgence in Indian writing (in English). something of a commodity to be sold via advertising hype, it Few writers themselves will feel confident, in their hearts, that they needs, all the same, a corollary: unlike Coca-Cola, a piece of writ- are living and working in a creative boom, though they may be ing is savoured best in the place where its secret recipe is from, forgiven if they take advantage of the probably short-lived monetary and more often than not it is only really possible for it to be benefits of its supposed existence; but journalists and publishers are busy assuring us that there is good cause for excitement . . . How most satisfyingly consumed in the same place too. much of the resurgence has to do with what publishers in England A case in point is Allan Sealy's first novel I. The Trotter-Nama consider the marketability of Indian fiction, and how much of it is (1988). Sealy, who lives in India and New Zealand and is of the genuine achievement, will take at least twenty or thirty years, or generation of 'Indo-Anglians' born after Independence, spent more, to decide. seven years writing the novel, at the end of which he repaired to London where the manuscript made the publishers' rounds. In There is in The Trotter-Nama, which is dedicated to 'The Other a short essay he contributed to Indian Review of Books (0ct.- Anglo-Indians', a section devoted to Henry Derozio. He appears NOV. 1993), Sealy recounts his brush with the conditions of in the novel as Henry Luis Vivian Fonseca-Trotter. In sharp con- globalization: trast to the man-who-imitated-Byron figure mentioned derisively 230 Partial Recall Towards a History of Indian Literature of English 23 1 has never been any let-up. In each decade new ways are found to In a way my journey to London was instructive. 'Why London?' I marginalize it. If in the 1960s it was likened to 'a blind alley . . . am sonletimes asked. I took my script there because I liked the way the British produced books, and I did not like the way books were leading no-where', in the 1990s it was seen as a phenomenon produced here. (As it happened the Americans [Knopf] produced a occurring not here, in India, but abroad. 'Writing for export' is handsome first edition, and the British [Penguin] a shoddy offprint.) how the Kannada novelist U.R. Anantha Murthy, a former But there would have been a colonial component to my anxiety. If chairman of the Sahitya Akademi (the National Aczdemy of so, I got my deserts. Not one British newspaper reviewed the book Letten), reacted on the Amul India Show to the success of Arun- when it appeared. Its discovery was an Indian critical undertaking; dhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997). The feeling that Indian papers and journals, Indian reviewers made its reputation. I readers of such novels are mainly in the West and that the writing am making a political, but I hope not chauvinistic, point. What my own experience taught me was that an English literary culture was is essentially being done for them is now common, so much so coming of age here-and I had been blind to it. that any attention a work receives is put down to the changed marketplace, to the large advance a novel occasionally fetches, to The marketplace is in any case a ficltle thing. In the TLS of 8 the publicity it generates in the Indian media. In the words of August 1997, Amit Chaudhuri takes, as a writer should, a long the historian Sumit Sarkar, "'Indo-Anglian" writing had to wait view of the matter and sounds a cautionary note. 'We are, appa- for postcolonial times to become a significant literary genre, rently', he says, under conditions of intensified globalization.' If this is an insight into the conditions that have recently made Indian writing in the midst of some sort of resurgence in Indian writing (in English). something of a commodity to be sold via advertising hype, it Few writers themselves will feel confident, in their hearts, that they needs, all the same, a corollary: unlike Coca-Cola, a piece of writ- are living and working in a creative boom, though they may be ing is savoured best in the place where its secret recipe is from, forgiven if they take advantage of the probably short-lived monetary and more often than not it is only really possible for it to be benefits of its supposed existence; but journalists and publishers are busy assuring us that there is good cause for excitement . . . How most satisfyingly consumed in the same place too. much of the resurgence has to do with what publishers in England A case in point is Allan Sealy's first novel I. The Trotter-Nama consider the marketability of Indian fiction, and how much of it is (1988). Sealy, who lives in India and New Zealand and is of the genuine achievement, will take at least twenty or thirty years, or generation of 'Indo-Anglians' born after Independence, spent more, to decide. seven years writing the novel, at the end of which he repaired to London where the manuscript made the publishers' rounds. In There is in The Trotter-Nama, which is dedicated to 'The Other a short essay he contributed to Indian Review of Books (0ct.- Anglo-Indians', a section devoted to Henry Derozio. He appears NOV. 1993), Sealy recounts his brush with the conditions of in the novel as Henry Luis Vivian Fonseca-Trotter. In sharp con- globalization: trast to the man-who-imitated-Byron figure mentioned derisively 232 Partial Recall Toward a History of Indian Literature of English 233 in Kipling's story, Fonseca-Trotter is a prospective indigo planter- who was the only Indian whose English verse was recognised as poetry in England, and the other girl was her sister Aru. They were the turned-revolutionary poet and Hindu College lecturer ('ink, daughters of Govinda Dutt of Rambagan and had died young, we not indigo, he declared loftily, was his medium'), whose 'students were further told. In fact, the picture had been published as an flocked to hear his sparkling but closely reasoned lectures, which illustration to a Bengali poem mourning their death. When we first ranged from speculative philosophy to poetic justice, and after- saw their picture I could not read the poem or anything at all. But I wards they gathered around him, won over by his charm and felt very proud that a Bengali girl had secured a place in English springy hair, to broach the issues ofthe day: the condition oflndia, literature. My brother also felt proud. So did our parents. the mastery of Europe, the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' At these meetings, which lasted well into the night, the The second is in V.S. Naipaul's Letters Between a Father and students, in defiance of social norms, would drink wine and eat Son (1999). On 5 October 1950, Seepersad Naipaul wrote to beef, and once during a particularly convivial evening 'they tossed Vidia, then in his first term at oxford: the bones of their feast into the house of a friend to taunt his orthodox father'. Fonseca-Trotter gets thrown out of his job as a Do send me a copy of R.K. Narayani Mr Sampath. The book is very favourably spoken of in The Ear$ Work in Literature, 194Sanannual result but dies soon after, aged twenty-three, in a cholera epidemic. publication of the British Council. Narayan is spoken of as 'the most This is a literature whose writers have seldom acknowledged delightful of Indian novelists writing in English . . . in a way that no each other's presence. The reason is perhaps that outside a com- English writer of our time can rival.' It is published by Eyre and mon geography-'the tract situated between the river Ganges Spottiswode, Ltd, 6 Great New St., London, EC4. The price is not and 1ndus'-and their location in the English language there is given. I shall refund you the money. little else they felt they could share. Sealy's tribute to Derozio, a tribute from one Anglo-Indian writer to another, from one 'Indo- Sealy's adoring portrait of Derozio; Chaudhuri's Bengali pride Anglian' to his literary forebear, is exceptional. It is also among in Toru and Aru Dutt; Seepersad Naipaul making a touching the few times that the literature has encrypted its history in one request of his son for an R.K. Narayan novel: in moments like of its texts. Art, it has been said, is its own historian. these, almost unknowingly, a literature becomes aware of itself, Two other moments stand out, both very different from the which is a different thing from others becoming aware of a above and from eachother. The first occurs in Nirad C. Chaudhuri's literature. The former is indigenization; the latter globalization. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (195 1): Whether one looks at the nineteenthcentury, when the English language was a mould into which the Indian writer tried to cast In a Bengali magazine subscribed to by my mother there had appeared himself-the poems in The Dutt Family Album (1870) are an in 1901 an illustration showing two Bengali girls in the lateVictoria11 example of this-or at the twentieth, when the writer has become English dress. 'Who are these @Is?' we asked in some perplexity, for they, though dressed like English girls, did not look English. My the moulding agency, a striking feature of Indian literature in mother explained that the older girl-wasToru Dutt, the young poetess English is that there have been no schools, literary movements, or 232 Partial Recall Toward a History of Indian Literature of English 233 in Kipling's story, Fonseca-Trotter is a prospective indigo planter- who was the only Indian whose English verse was recognised as poetry in England, and the other girl was her sister Aru. They were the turned-revolutionary poet and Hindu College lecturer ('ink, daughters of Govinda Dutt of Rambagan and had died young, we not indigo, he declared loftily, was his medium'), whose 'students were further told. In fact, the picture had been published as an flocked to hear his sparkling but closely reasoned lectures, which illustration to a Bengali poem mourning their death. When we first ranged from speculative philosophy to poetic justice, and after- saw their picture I could not read the poem or anything at all. But I wards they gathered around him, won over by his charm and felt very proud that a Bengali girl had secured a place in English springy hair, to broach the issues ofthe day: the condition oflndia, literature. My brother also felt proud. So did our parents. the mastery of Europe, the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' At these meetings, which lasted well into the night, the The second is in V.S. Naipaul's Letters Between a Father and students, in defiance of social norms, would drink wine and eat Son (1999). On 5 October 1950, Seepersad Naipaul wrote to beef, and once during a particularly convivial evening 'they tossed Vidia, then in his first term at oxford: the bones of their feast into the house of a friend to taunt his orthodox father'. Fonseca-Trotter gets thrown out of his job as a Do send me a copy of R.K. Narayani Mr Sampath. The book is very favourably spoken of in The Ear$ Work in Literature, 194Sanannual result but dies soon after, aged twenty-three, in a cholera epidemic. publication of the British Council. Narayan is spoken of as 'the most This is a literature whose writers have seldom acknowledged delightful of Indian novelists writing in English . . . in a way that no each other's presence. The reason is perhaps that outside a com- English writer of our time can rival.' It is published by Eyre and mon geography-'the tract situated between the river Ganges Spottiswode, Ltd, 6 Great New St., London, EC4. The price is not and 1ndus'-and their location in the English language there is given. I shall refund you the money. little else they felt they could share. Sealy's tribute to Derozio, a tribute from one Anglo-Indian writer to another, from one 'Indo- Sealy's adoring portrait of Derozio; Chaudhuri's Bengali pride Anglian' to his literary forebear, is exceptional. It is also among in Toru and Aru Dutt; Seepersad Naipaul making a touching the few times that the literature has encrypted its history in one request of his son for an R.K. Narayan novel: in moments like of its texts. Art, it has been said, is its own historian. these, almost unknowingly, a literature becomes aware of itself, Two other moments stand out, both very different from the which is a different thing from others becoming aware of a above and from eachother. The first occurs in Nirad C. Chaudhuri's literature. The former is indigenization; the latter globalization. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (195 1): Whether one looks at the nineteenthcentury, when the English language was a mould into which the Indian writer tried to cast In a Bengali magazine subscribed to by my mother there had appeared himself-the poems in The Dutt Family Album (1870) are an in 1901 an illustration showing two Bengali girls in the lateVictoria11 example of this-or at the twentieth, when the writer has become English dress. 'Who are these @Is?' we asked in some perplexity, for they, though dressed like English girls, did not look English. My the moulding agency, a striking feature of Indian literature in mother explained that the older girl-wasToru Dutt, the young poetess English is that there have been no schools, literary movements, or 234 Partial Recall 7owardr a History of Indian Literature of Eng/& 23 5

I even regional groups within it. Its history is scattered, disconti- by letter; no movement more gaceful than the carriage's as it slid nuous, and transnational. It is made up of individual writers I from right to left; no music sweeter than the bell's which rose who appear to be suigeneris. They are explained neither by what warningly from the depths of the machine and which meant that went before them nor by what came after. But this is now 1 the carriage could proceed no further. chafiging. 'Hard to imagine I. Allan Sealy's Trotter-Nama with- Recently, while emptying out a steel almirah in my house in out Desani. My own writing, too, has learnt a thing or two from Dehra Dun, I came across carbon copies of a few of those early him', Rushdie has said recently; and Mukul Kesavan, who heard poems and read them with embarrassment first, but afterwards in Rushdie read from Midnight; Children in Cambridge in 198 1, has the expectation of learning a little about myself and the kind of described it as a 'religious experience'. Kesavan, who was a re- \ literary fledgling 1 was in 1964. Some of the poems 1 looked at search student at the time, brought out his own Rushdie-inspired used capital letters, but others did not. My subjects were the first novel, Looking Through Glass (1995), fourteen years later. indestructibility of love and the'earth's destruction, and I used This literary effort, alongside those by others who were con- words like 'adieu' and 'gloam'. The shorter poems, of which there temporaries at Delhi's St Stephen's College in the 1970s, has been were several, seemed to be written in the belief that anything somewhat playfully described as a 'school' in The Fiction of of haiku length is automatically also profound. In 1964, the St. Stephen? (2000). year Nehru died, the year VS. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness was Though the literature's past does not reflect its present, maybe published, I was sitting in darkness's heart, in a bungalow in its present, which has increasingly become self-perceiving and Allahabad, in a railway waiting room in Bilaspur, and as scores of self-recognizing, holds in it the seeds of its future. Indian poets-from Henry Derozio to Srinivas Rayaprol-had done before me, I was taking my bearings from distant stars. The two I took mine from were e.e. cummings and Kahlil Gibran. If you also have been a part of the literature being mapped, then its contour will somewhere bear a likeness to your own. As a seventeen-year-old thirty-seven years ago, when I was in the small towns of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh hammer- I ing out my first poems on a grandfatherly typewriter, Indian literature, whether in English or in the Indian languages, was not something I was even dimly aware of. I cannot say what thoughts filled my adolescent mind then, except that I was in love with the smoothness of the black keys and the long space bar, and with the clattering sound they made when pressed. Nothing, I felt, could be lovelier than the sight of a line forming on a white sheet, letter 234 Partial Recall 7owardr a History of Indian Literature of Eng/& 23 5

'Self-Portrait' has it), A.K. Ramanujan was born in Mysore in 1929 into a family ofSrivaishnavaTami1 Brahmins. His father was a professor of mathematics, and Ramanujan grew up in a multi- Looking for A.K. Ramanujan lingual environment in which Tamil, Kannada, and English were spoken. He was educated in Mysore and Poona, and in the 1950s taught in various colleges in South India, but mainly in Belgaum. In 1958 he went to the United States to do a Ph.D. in Linguistics at Indiana University, and in 1962 was appointed to the University In looking for ways to describe A.K. Ramanujan and the many of Chicago, where he remained for the next thirty years. He died disciplines he straddled, one thinks, with reason, of performing there under anaesthesia, during ahotched operation, in 1993. men: in his teens Ramanujan had wanted to become a professional Ramanujan was. thirty-seven when The Striders (1966) was magician, and even got a neighbourhood tailor to stitch him a coat published. Thereafter like Philip Larkin's, his books of poems ap- with hidden pockets and elastic bands, to which he added a top- peared at the rate of one per decade, Relations in 197 1 and Second hat andwand. Thus outfitted, he appeared before school and club Sight in 1986. When his Collected Poems came out in 1995, its audiences, plucking rabbits and bouquets of flowers out of thin fourth and last section consisted of The Black Hen, the collection air, just as in later life he enthralled his classes at the University of he was working on and had almost completed at the time of his Chicago with his lectures, and his readers across the globe with a death. A poem in it, dated 16 March 1992, reads uncannily like steady flow of poems, translations, and essays. 'Beginning often a premonition: with a provocative question', Milton Singer has said ofhis teaching Birth rakes a long time method, 'Raman would proceed to present such a diversity of texts though death can be sudden, and contexts, oral and written tales, poems, interviews, and con- and multiple, like pregnant deer versations, that the answer to the question would become inescap- shot down on the run . . . able, not as a dogmatic assertion, but as an invitation to look at ('Birthdays') the posed question from a fresh perspective.' Another Chicago colleague, Wendy Doniger, has spoken of his contribution to In the United States, however, Ramanujan, the poet, was little Indological studies as a 'great intellectual trapeze act' performed known. Perhaps nothing indicates this better than the double- 'withouta net, between two worlds', the Indian and the American. spread illustration called Galaxy of Contemporary Poets in the Ramanujan's own view of himself was more down to earth. He Harper Anthology ofpoetry (1981). The galaxy is filled with the called himself the hyphen in Indo-American. starry names of the poets of England and America, and though Magician, trapezist, and, especially on first acquaintance, a Ramanujan is one of the stars, his name appears at the very edge, master ofdisguise ('I resemble eve~yonelbut myself', as the early a tiny dot in the bottom right corner. It was not his cunningly 238 Partial Recall Looking for A.K. Ramanujan 239 made poems, but the five volumes of not less artfullyplotted trans- is unambiguous. 'The ideal', he wrote in the introduction to lations from Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu, with their elaborate Hymnsfor the Drowning, 'is still Dryden's, "a kind of drawing after diagram-filled introductions and afterwords, that made Rama- the life"', and he says in 'On Translating a 'Tamil Poem' that 'The nujan's international reputation. They are The Interior Landscape only possible translation is a "free" one1: (1967), Speaking of Siva (1973), Hymnsfor the Drowning (198 l), Poems ofLove and War (1985), and, with Velcheru Narayana Rao Translations are transpositions, reenactments, interpretations. Some elements of the original cannot be transposed at all. One can often and David Shulman, When God is a Customer ( 1994). convey a sense of the original rhythm, but not the language-bound Ramanujan's other important work was in oral literature and meter, one can mimic levels of diction, but not the actual sound of folklore, areas he had pursued since the early 1950s. His very first the original words. Textures are harder (maybe impossible) to translate book, published in 1955, had been a collection of proverbs in than structure, linear order morqdifficult than syntax, lines more Kannada, and during the next forty years he wrote extensively on difficult than larger patterns. Poetry is made at all these levels-and such subjects as 'The Indian Oedipus', 'On Folk Mythologies and so is translation. That is why nothing less than a poem can translate Folk Puranas', and 'Who Needs Folklore? The Relevance of another. Oral Traditions to South Asian Studies', often drawing on his field notes for examples. Together with his essays on literature and George Chapman, the translator of Homer and, like Dryden, one culture, these have been published in Collected Essays (1999). It is of Ramanujan's forebears, put it thus: 'With Poesie to open only appropriate that the last book ofhis to appear in his lifetime Poesie'. should be Folklore of India (1991), many of whose tales he had Ramanujan separates those elements in a poem that resist trans- collected himself. Left out of this account are Ramanujan's lation from those that do not. Levels of diction, syntax, and phra- translation of U.R. Anantha Murthy's novel, Samskard (1976), ses are the translator's points of entry. Through them he nudges and his writings in Kannada, which include three collections of his way into the material, before dyeing it, thread by thread, in verse and a novella. Indeed, it has been remarked by a Kannada the colour of his voice, one that is, like a fingerprint or signature, poet that the only way to do justice to a bilingual writer like unique to him. No two translations of the same poem, for this Ramanujan is to read his English and Kannada poems together, reason, can sound the same. It's a way of translation; there are preferably between the covers of the same book. others. Ramanvjan is quick to caution, though, that by free trans- If Ramanujan's are some of the most eloquent translations of lation he does not mean an untethered one. 'Yet "anything goes" Indian literature available in English, it's largely because he was a will not do', he says, adding immediately afterwards, 'The trans- not inconsiderable poet in English himself. In the running battle latioh must not only represent, but re-present, the original. One between the 'literalists' who believe that you can translate only if walks a tightrope between theTo-language and the From-language, you bite off a good half of your own tongue and those for whom in a double loyalty. A translator is "an artist on oath".' Having translation is 'to metaphor', to 'carry across', Ramanujan's position said this, Ramanujan once again faces in the opposite direction. 238 Partial Recall Looking for A.K. Ramanujan 239 made poems, but the five volumes of not less artfullyplotted trans- is unambiguous. 'The ideal', he wrote in the introduction to lations from Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu, with their elaborate Hymnsfor the Drowning, 'is still Dryden's, "a kind of drawing after diagram-filled introductions and afterwords, that made Rama- the life"', and he says in 'On Translating a 'Tamil Poem' that 'The nujan's international reputation. They are The Interior Landscape only possible translation is a "free" one1: (1967), Speaking of Siva (1973), Hymnsfor the Drowning (198 l), Poems ofLove and War (1985), and, with Velcheru Narayana Rao Translations are transpositions, reenactments, interpretations. Some elements of the original cannot be transposed at all. One can often and David Shulman, When God is a Customer ( 1994). convey a sense of the original rhythm, but not the language-bound Ramanujan's other important work was in oral literature and meter, one can mimic levels of diction, but not the actual sound of folklore, areas he had pursued since the early 1950s. His very first the original words. Textures are harder (maybe impossible) to translate book, published in 1955, had been a collection of proverbs in than structure, linear order morqdifficult than syntax, lines more Kannada, and during the next forty years he wrote extensively on difficult than larger patterns. Poetry is made at all these levels-and such subjects as 'The Indian Oedipus', 'On Folk Mythologies and so is translation. That is why nothing less than a poem can translate Folk Puranas', and 'Who Needs Folklore? The Relevance of another. Oral Traditions to South Asian Studies', often drawing on his field notes for examples. Together with his essays on literature and George Chapman, the translator of Homer and, like Dryden, one culture, these have been published in Collected Essays (1999). It is of Ramanujan's forebears, put it thus: 'With Poesie to open only appropriate that the last book ofhis to appear in his lifetime Poesie'. should be Folklore of India (1991), many of whose tales he had Ramanujan separates those elements in a poem that resist trans- collected himself. Left out of this account are Ramanujan's lation from those that do not. Levels of diction, syntax, and phra- translation of U.R. Anantha Murthy's novel, Samskard (1976), ses are the translator's points of entry. Through them he nudges and his writings in Kannada, which include three collections of his way into the material, before dyeing it, thread by thread, in verse and a novella. Indeed, it has been remarked by a Kannada the colour of his voice, one that is, like a fingerprint or signature, poet that the only way to do justice to a bilingual writer like unique to him. No two translations of the same poem, for this Ramanujan is to read his English and Kannada poems together, reason, can sound the same. It's a way of translation; there are preferably between the covers of the same book. others. Ramanvjan is quick to caution, though, that by free trans- If Ramanujan's are some of the most eloquent translations of lation he does not mean an untethered one. 'Yet "anything goes" Indian literature available in English, it's largely because he was a will not do', he says, adding immediately afterwards, 'The trans- not inconsiderable poet in English himself. In the running battle latioh must not only represent, but re-present, the original. One between the 'literalists' who believe that you can translate only if walks a tightrope between theTo-language and the From-language, you bite off a good half of your own tongue and those for whom in a double loyalty. A translator is "an artist on oath".' Having translation is 'to metaphor', to 'carry across', Ramanujan's position said this, Ramanujan once again faces in the opposite direction. 240 Partial Recall Looking for A.K Ramanujan 24 1

'Sometimes', he says, 'one may succeed only in re-presenting a own English poems. He was, in the early 1960s, still writing poem, not in closely representing it.' Clearly, the tightrope between some of the poems that were to appear in The Striders, and just as poetry and Indology, modern English and earlyTami1, is not easily what he knew as a modernist poet reinforced his translations, what walked. Like some of his other essays, 'On Translating a Tamil he was learning as a translator found its way into his poems. When Poem' ends with a parable: Ramanujan says of the Tamil poems that often they 'unify their rich and diverse associations by using a single, long, marvellously A Chinese emperor ordered a tunnel to be bored through a great managed sentence', he could well be describing his own practice. mountain. The engineers decided that the best and quickest way to Not only are some of his poems similarly made, but the single do it would be to begin work on both sides of the mountain, after syntax-driven sentence can take a page or more to unfold. precise measurements. If the measurements are precise enough, the rwo tunnels will meet in the middle, making a single one. 'But what Ramanujan also pointed out the correspondence between the happens if they don't meet?' asked the emperor. The counselors, in ancient Tamil poets and a modeA master like Marianne Moore. their wisdom, answered, 'If they don't meet, we will have two tunnels Explaining why the Tamil poets chose the kurinri flower to sug- instead of one.' gest the mood of first love, he says the choice was partly motivated by a botanical fact: 'a kurinci plant comes to flower only from Poet-translators seem to find their chosen material almost nine to twelve years after it is planted-this identifies it with the serendipitously, and Ramanujan discovered his in a library base- tropical virgin heroine who comes to puberty at the same age.' ment where, on one of his first Saturdays at the University of 'Thus is the real world', he says in the afterword to Poems ofLove Chicago, he had gone in search of an elementary grammar of Old b and War, 'always kept in sight and included in the symbolic.These Tamil. While looking for it, he stumbled upon the Kuruntokai, poets would have made a poet like Marianne Moore happy: they one of the eight anthologies of classical Tamil ascribed to the first are "literalists of the imagination", presenting for inspection in three centuries CE. 'I sat down on the floor between the stacks', poem after poem "imaginary gardens with real toads in them".' he writes, 'and began to browse. To my amazement, I found the But if the ancient Tamils are among Miss Moore's Borgesian prose commentary transparent, it soon unlocked the old poems precursors, Ramanujan is among those who learnt from her exam- for me.' Ramanujan's translations of these poems started appearing ple: his five-toed lizards, salamanders, quartz clocks, and poem in American journals as early as 1964, and in 1965 Writers Work- titles that double also as first lines can be traced to her. These and shop, Calcutta, published a small selection, Ftfeen Poemsfiom a other parallels, resemblances, mediations, and overlaps make his Classical TamilAnthology.This was followed two years later by The poems and translations of a piece; they seem as two halves of an Interior Landscape, the book which established Ramanujan's indivisible whole. reputation as the inventor ofTamil poetry for our time. Though the influence of Ramanujan's example on the translation of Indian classics into English is yet to be assessed, there is For someone who published only three average-sized collections little doubt about the ways in which the translations shaped his of verse in his lifetime, Ramanujan's Collected Poems surprises by 242 Partial Recall Looking for A.K. Ramnnujan 243 its length. It runs to almost 300 pages. Its other surprise is that through the train window.The first stanza consists ofone line, the there are no other surprises. For instance, the allusions that seem second of two, the third of three, and so on till the sixth. There- to proliferate in the later work are there from the beginning. They after, in the five remaining stanzas, the number oflines successive- range over many disciplines-literature, philosophy, psychology, ly decreases, till we come to the last stanzawhich, like the last first, anthropology, religion, folklore-and from the Taittiriya Upanishad is of one line. This is how the poem concludes: to L.P. Hartley. This is less an indication of his reading, wide as it . . . I see a man was, than of the way his kinship-seeking mind worked, the run- J on lines wiring up its different parts, or disconnecting them. between two rocks. When the latter happened, as in Second Sight, the result could I think of the symmetry be chilling: of human buttocks. . Suddenly, connections severed Having once found his style, Ramanujan saw no call to make as in a lobotomy, unburdened changes, not even minor ones. His speech is consistently demotic, of history, I lose the stanzas inventive, the tone-in the face of much suffering- wry, bemused, clinical. By comparison, Larkin looks a senti- my bearings, a circus zilla spun mentalist. The examples below are from The Black Hen. The at the end of her rope, dizzy, circumstances-a divorce, a medical investigation-belong to a terrified, later period ('Pain' in fact was finished weeks before his death), but the droll manner goes back to where it was first and happy. And my watchers The Striders, watch, cool as fires perfected: in a mirror. April to June burned ('Looking for the Centre') night and day like a temple lamp kept alive by a cripple praying Though several poems in Second Sight are written in the same for her legs two-and-a-half-line stanza, forming a scattered sequence, Rama- nujan generally gives the poem a shape that is original to it. His and July was at war, poems, exquisitely crafted, are as much objects to hold between bombs overhead, fingers as ~rintedlines to read with the eyes. A good example is napalm fires in the bone, children almost drowned 'Poona Train Window'. Its eleven stanzas are conventionally laid in a flash flood out in a column on the page, which is why we do not immediately pick out the underlying design, whose inspiration comes from of divorce papers. the very part of the human anatomy Ramanujan contemplates ('August') 242 Partial Recall Looking for A.K. Ramnnujan 243 its length. It runs to almost 300 pages. Its other surprise is that through the train window.The first stanza consists ofone line, the there are no other surprises. For instance, the allusions that seem second of two, the third of three, and so on till the sixth. There- to proliferate in the later work are there from the beginning. They after, in the five remaining stanzas, the number oflines successive- range over many disciplines-literature, philosophy, psychology, ly decreases, till we come to the last stanzawhich, like the last first, anthropology, religion, folklore-and from the Taittiriya Upanishad is of one line. This is how the poem concludes: to L.P. Hartley. This is less an indication of his reading, wide as it . . . I see a man was, than of the way his kinship-seeking mind worked, the run- J on lines wiring up its different parts, or disconnecting them. between two rocks. When the latter happened, as in Second Sight, the result could I think of the symmetry be chilling: of human buttocks. . Suddenly, connections severed Having once found his style, Ramanujan saw no call to make as in a lobotomy, unburdened changes, not even minor ones. His speech is consistently demotic, of history, I lose the stanzas inventive, the tone-in the face of much suffering- wry, bemused, clinical. By comparison, Larkin looks a senti- my bearings, a circus zilla spun mentalist. The examples below are from The Black Hen. The at the end of her rope, dizzy, circumstances-a divorce, a medical investigation-belong to a terrified, later period ('Pain' in fact was finished weeks before his death), but the droll manner goes back to where it was first and happy. And my watchers The Striders, watch, cool as fires perfected: in a mirror. April to June burned ('Looking for the Centre') night and day like a temple lamp kept alive by a cripple praying Though several poems in Second Sight are written in the same for her legs two-and-a-half-line stanza, forming a scattered sequence, Rama- nujan generally gives the poem a shape that is original to it. His and July was at war, poems, exquisitely crafted, are as much objects to hold between bombs overhead, fingers as ~rintedlines to read with the eyes. A good example is napalm fires in the bone, children almost drowned 'Poona Train Window'. Its eleven stanzas are conventionally laid in a flash flood out in a column on the page, which is why we do not immediately pick out the underlying design, whose inspiration comes from of divorce papers. the very part of the human anatomy Ramanujan contemplates ('August') Looking for A.K Ramanujan 244 Partial Recall Just comb your hair. Doctors X-ray the foot, front face and back, You shouldn't worry about Despair. left profile and right as if for a police Despair is a strange disease. file, unearth shadow fossils of neanderthals I think it happens even to trees. buried in this contemporary foot; they draw three test tubes of blood as I turn ('Excerpts from a Father's Wisdom') my face away, and label my essences with a mis-spelled name . . . 4 'Snakes', the second poem in The Striders, refers to this state of ('Pain') dread metaphorically. Our tormentors are not remote creatures we meet only in woods while taking a walk, but appear where we Full of paradoxes, with also a gift for making them; often auto- expect them least: in the cool of libraries, staring out of any 'book biographical, but seldom transparently so; tight-lipped, but fanta- that has gold/ on its spine', or in~hesafety of our homes where sizing about stripping; deadly serious, but never more so than when being playful; this was Ramanujan. In 'A Poor Man's Riches Sister ties her braids with a knot of tassel. 1' he refers to the colour ofhis eyes and, 'classified1 in each oblong But the weave of her knee-long braid has scales, of visa and passport', the distinguishing 'five moles' on his face. their gleaming held by a score of clean new pins. It's a face he hid behind many masks. The changing shapes of I look till I see her hair again. the mask and the face behind them are, from different angles, what he probed in poems written over four decades. Eventually, the snake is killed-'Now/ frogs can hop upon this 5 Except for The Black Hen, which was put together by an eight- sausage rope1-only to live another day. It is not long in coming. member committee after his death, Ramanujan's three previous In 'Breaded Fish', which is only one poem away from 'Snakes', the collections are so arranged that each poem illuminates the one snake image reappears. This time it is 'a hood/ of memory like a following it, and is illuminated by it in return. They are thus coil on a heath', which, when it opens in the speaker's eyes, makes doubly lit, throwing unexpected shadows. In T/)e Striders, 'No him see not some specially made 'breaded fish'-'a blunt-headed/ Man Is an Island' and 'Anxiety' appear on facing pages. The for- smell'-that a woman is thrusting into his mouth, but mer concludes, 'But this man,/ I know, buys dental floss.' and the . a dark half-naked latter 'But anxiety/ can find no metaphor to end it.' Unrelated . . length of woman, dead though the two poems seem to be, they make a joint statement, on the beach in a yard of cloth, which is that no amount of flossing will get rid of this thing wedg- ed between the teeth. Ramanujan's word for it here is 'anxiety'; dry, rolled by the ebb, breaded in his other poems it is called 'despair', 'fear', 'anger', 'madness', by the grained indifference of sand. I headed for the shore, my heart beating in my mouth. 'lust'. It is his major theme, even when he is writing in a minor key: Looking for A.K Ramanujan 244 Partial Recall Just comb your hair. Doctors X-ray the foot, front face and back, You shouldn't worry about Despair. left profile and right as if for a police Despair is a strange disease. file, unearth shadow fossils of neanderthals I think it happens even to trees. buried in this contemporary foot; they draw three test tubes of blood as I turn ('Excerpts from a Father's Wisdom') my face away, and label my essences with a mis-spelled name . . . 4 'Snakes', the second poem in The Striders, refers to this state of ('Pain') dread metaphorically. Our tormentors are not remote creatures we meet only in woods while taking a walk, but appear where we Full of paradoxes, with also a gift for making them; often auto- expect them least: in the cool of libraries, staring out of any 'book biographical, but seldom transparently so; tight-lipped, but fanta- that has gold/ on its spine', or in~hesafety of our homes where sizing about stripping; deadly serious, but never more so than when being playful; this was Ramanujan. In 'A Poor Man's Riches Sister ties her braids with a knot of tassel. 1' he refers to the colour ofhis eyes and, 'classified1 in each oblong But the weave of her knee-long braid has scales, of visa and passport', the distinguishing 'five moles' on his face. their gleaming held by a score of clean new pins. It's a face he hid behind many masks. The changing shapes of I look till I see her hair again. the mask and the face behind them are, from different angles, what he probed in poems written over four decades. Eventually, the snake is killed-'Now/ frogs can hop upon this 5 Except for The Black Hen, which was put together by an eight- sausage rope1-only to live another day. It is not long in coming. member committee after his death, Ramanujan's three previous In 'Breaded Fish', which is only one poem away from 'Snakes', the collections are so arranged that each poem illuminates the one snake image reappears. This time it is 'a hood/ of memory like a following it, and is illuminated by it in return. They are thus coil on a heath', which, when it opens in the speaker's eyes, makes doubly lit, throwing unexpected shadows. In T/)e Striders, 'No him see not some specially made 'breaded fish'-'a blunt-headed/ Man Is an Island' and 'Anxiety' appear on facing pages. The for- smell'-that a woman is thrusting into his mouth, but mer concludes, 'But this man,/ I know, buys dental floss.' and the . a dark half-naked latter 'But anxiety/ can find no metaphor to end it.' Unrelated . . length of woman, dead though the two poems seem to be, they make a joint statement, on the beach in a yard of cloth, which is that no amount of flossing will get rid of this thing wedg- ed between the teeth. Ramanujan's word for it here is 'anxiety'; dry, rolled by the ebb, breaded in his other poems it is called 'despair', 'fear', 'anger', 'madness', by the grained indifference of sand. I headed for the shore, my heart beating in my mouth. 'lust'. It is his major theme, even when he is writing in a minor key: 246 Partial Recall Looking for A.K. Ramanujan

In a poem of twelve lines, the first eleven are one sentence. from your daughter's hair 'Others see a rush, a carnival, a million,/ why does he see noth- and you drown, eyes open, ing, or worse, just one', Ramanujan asks in 'Some People'. When towards the Indies, the antipodes. the eye sees one thing and memory apprehends another, an un- And you, always'io perfectly sane. suspected crevice opens up between the two, into which there is always a risk of falling. Ramanujan, who knew the risk only too In these episodes of blindness and sight, falling and drowning, well, often spoke ofthe mind's terrors in precisely such images. We self-mockery and the stress ofextreme experience run side by side, find them as early as 'The Fall' in The Striders, where the poem making it a performance by turns delightful and alarming to works out a metaphor taken from parachuting, and as late as the watch. But Ramanujan does not always pull it off, and there are last poem in The Black Hen, 'Fear No Fall'. 'Chicago Zen', in times in Second Sight when he gets carried away, parodying his Second Sight, enacts all the stages of the drama and concludes on own act, as in 'Dancers in a Hospital', the first three sections of a note of mock warning: 'Looking for the Centre', and 'Waterfalls in a Bank'. To be all one's life both drowning 'towards . . . the antipodes' and watch for the last and standing firmly on dry land; to be held motionless between step that's never there. private grotesqueries and public mask; to exist on two planes at the same time: Ramanujan called this 'living by contraries'. Perfectly Ramanujan, however, is a poet of last steps taken, the plunge sane, though, are the poems' beginnings, giving little hint of the made, the descent begun. He is all about being blinded by sight topsyturviness to come. Ironic, chatty, quick-witted, and full of 'in unexpected places': in the middle of 'a whole milling confe- inner rhymes, assonance, and wordplay, their breezy tone, within rencelon Delhi milk and China soyabean' in 'Some Place', and in the space of a line, can turn into a very black storm.,They begin the middle of a street in 'Chicago Zen': as routinely as 'Routine Day Sonnet' ('For me a perfectly ordinary/ The traffic light turns orange day at the office'), or as innocently as nursery rhymes ('One two on 57th and Dorchester, and you stumble three four five/ five fingers to a hand'), and, like routine days and nulsery rhymes, end in catastrophe. The same pattern, more or you fall, into a vision of forest fires, less, is seen in 'Conventions of Despair': enter a frothing Himalayan river,

rapid, silent. Yes, I know all that. I should be modern. Marry again. See strippers at the Tease. On the 14th floor, Touch Africa. Go to the movies. Lake Michigan crawls and crawfs Impale a six-inch spider in the window. Your thumbnail under a lens. Join the Test- cracks a lobster louse on the windowpane ban, or become The Outsider. 246 Partial Recall Looking for A.K. Ramanujan

Or pay to shake my fist Pound. It occurs in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in a passage lament- (or-whatever-you-calI-it) at the psychoanalyst. ing those killed in the Great War: And when I burn Died some, pro patria, 1 should smile, dry-eyed, non 'dulce' non 'et decor . . . and nurse martinis like the Marginal Man. walked eye-deep in hell But, sorry, I cannot unlearn believing in old men's lies . . .

conventions of despair. (iv) They have their ride. 'Conventions of Despair' continues for another seven stanzas, I must seek and will find but its point has been made, three times over. Our 'particular my particular hell only in my hindu mind: hell'-or 'tiny strip1 of sky'-in which we burn, blister, and roast, must translate and turn is the one constant we have in 'a landslide of lights'. The rest is a till I blister and roast bit of role-playing, a bit of shamming, like taking off and putting on costumes, whether ofexplorer, scientist, peacenik, or Outsider. for certain lives to come, 'eye-deep', A poet does not bring his unruly 'little demons' under control in those Boiling Crates of Oil . . . by shaking his fist at the analyst, but by keeping a meticulous Without breaking the offhand manner, the poem suddenly record oftheir deeds in card-sized stanzas. The following entry, the swings into its subject in the fourth stanza. Ramanujan, who loved sixth of eight, is from 'Entries for a Catalogue of Fears': paradoxes, conveys hell very differently in the well-known title Like any honest poem of the same collection in which 'Conventions of Despair' man, unnerved by the slightest appears: inquiry into his flawless past, found spotted all over with horrid fact This bug sits by the mere act on a landslide of lights of questioning: and drowns eye- or found helplessly handling deep my thing into its tiny strip at seventy of sky. on a doorstep ('The Striders') wiping out a whole difficult lifetime of dignity Connecting the two depictions, one done in the style of bazaar and earning only the fascination oleographs and the other a prize-winning piece of nature photo- of passing graphy, is the phrase 'eye-deep', which itself is a tag from Ezra old women. I Looking for A. K Ramanujan 25 1 250 Partial Recall I As early as 'Towards Simplicity' in The Striders, Ramanujan, in We catch another glimpse of the man on the doorstep in 'Foundlings in the Yukon'. Written more than nventy years after what became a favourite strategy of his, had drawn the human body and the natural world into one frame: 'Entries for a Catalogue of Fears', this late poem is based on a newspaper report, the discovely by miners in northwest Canada, Corpuscle, skin, near the Arctic Circle, of some seeds that had been 'sealed off by cell, and membrane, a landslidel in Pleistocene times' When planted, six of the seeds each has its minute seasons 'took root1 within forty-eight hours/ and sprouted1 a candelabra clocked within the bones. of eight small leaves'. These 'up-starts', Ramanujan says, I The poem projects death as a respite 'From the complexity1 of drank up sun reasons gyring within reasons', ? return, if only for a while, to and unfurled early 'simplicity' and 'larger, external seasons'. But whereas 'Towards with the crocuses in March , Simplicity' is 'Yeatsian and schematic, like a geometrical figure, as if long deep 'Foundlings in the Yukon' is many-layered, expansive, flowing. burial had made them hasty No feature of Ramanujan's emotional geography is absent from it, for birth and season, for names, and yet each appears as if newly 'unfurled'. Sexual hunger, lust, genes, for passing on: the 'horrid fact' which can wipe out 'a whole difficult lifetime1 like the kick of dignity', are transformed into a metaphor for irrepressible and shift of an intra-urerine life itself. The Pleistocene rocks in which the 'sealed off' seeds memory, like are found, the six seeds that 'took root and 'drank up sun', and this morning's dream of being the centenarian's 'pent-up' seeds, bind the animal, vegetable, born in an eaglei and mineral worlds together to make one of Ramanujan's happi- nesr with speckled eggs and screech est poems. of nestlings, like a pent-up Seekers after happiness, though, should turn to Ramanujan's centenarian's sudden burst translations. In them, he could be both himself (the skilful of lust, or maybe Modernist poet) and somebody else; could inhabit both previous just elegies in Duino unbound centuries and his own. As he says in a late poem, 'Time moves in from the dark, i and out of me'. Here is an example from The Interior Landscape: these new aborigines biding l their time WFIAI.HE SAID for the miner's night-light As a little white snake to bring them their dawn . . with lovely stripes on its young body I Looking for A. K Ramanujan 25 1 250 Partial Recall I As early as 'Towards Simplicity' in The Striders, Ramanujan, in We catch another glimpse of the man on the doorstep in 'Foundlings in the Yukon'. Written more than nventy years after what became a favourite strategy of his, had drawn the human body and the natural world into one frame: 'Entries for a Catalogue of Fears', this late poem is based on a newspaper report, the discovely by miners in northwest Canada, Corpuscle, skin, near the Arctic Circle, of some seeds that had been 'sealed off by cell, and membrane, a landslidel in Pleistocene times' When planted, six of the seeds each has its minute seasons 'took root1 within forty-eight hours/ and sprouted1 a candelabra clocked within the bones. of eight small leaves'. These 'up-starts', Ramanujan says, I The poem projects death as a respite 'From the complexity1 of drank up sun reasons gyring within reasons', ? return, if only for a while, to and unfurled early 'simplicity' and 'larger, external seasons'. But whereas 'Towards with the crocuses in March , Simplicity' is 'Yeatsian and schematic, like a geometrical figure, as if long deep 'Foundlings in the Yukon' is many-layered, expansive, flowing. burial had made them hasty No feature of Ramanujan's emotional geography is absent from it, for birth and season, for names, and yet each appears as if newly 'unfurled'. Sexual hunger, lust, genes, for passing on: the 'horrid fact' which can wipe out 'a whole difficult lifetime1 like the kick of dignity', are transformed into a metaphor for irrepressible and shift of an intra-urerine life itself. The Pleistocene rocks in which the 'sealed off' seeds memory, like are found, the six seeds that 'took root and 'drank up sun', and this morning's dream of being the centenarian's 'pent-up' seeds, bind the animal, vegetable, born in an eaglei and mineral worlds together to make one of Ramanujan's happi- nesr with speckled eggs and screech est poems. of nestlings, like a pent-up Seekers after happiness, though, should turn to Ramanujan's centenarian's sudden burst translations. In them, he could be both himself (the skilful of lust, or maybe Modernist poet) and somebody else; could inhabit both previous just elegies in Duino unbound centuries and his own. As he says in a late poem, 'Time moves in from the dark, i and out of me'. Here is an example from The Interior Landscape: these new aborigines biding l their time WFIAI.HE SAID for the miner's night-light As a little white snake to bring them their dawn . . with lovely stripes on its young body 252 Partial Recall

troubles the jungle elephant this slip of a girl her teeth like sprouts of new rice her wrists stacked with bangles troubles me. Street Music: A Brief History

In the ordering of its lines, the translation from the classical Tamil reminds one of some of his more inventive stanza shapes, but the resemblance ends there. Unlike the interior landscape of his poems, there is no place for razors, kitchen knives, or bandaged heads (the gruesome list could go on) in this one. The story of Indian literature in English, if not of Indian literature But the reader looking for A.K. Ramanujan, where should he as a whole, is a story of forgetfulness. Does anyone nQwremember turn? To the poems, the translations, or the essays? As befits the that one ofour finest essayists was Aubrey Menen (1912-89) who, magician he set out to be, Ramanujan can be found in the same in The Space Within the Heart, also wrote a classic autobiogra- interconnected work that he had, an instant ago, his multipb phy? Or that there was once a poet called Nobo Kissen Ghose selves intact, disappeared into. (1837-19 18) who, under the pseudonym of Ram Sharma, wrote poems like 'Stanzas to Lord Lytton's Infant Son' ('Tiny Hindu! When to manhood grown,/ Wilt thou love the land that gave thee birth?')? 0; that there was a journal edited by Ramananda Chat- terjee called The Modern Review, to which Ezra Pound, Tagore, Jadunath Sarkar, Nehru, and Verrier Elwin contributed? What keeps a name from sinking into oblivion is a literary culture, in which universities have an obvious role to play. It's a role that Indian universities abandoned a long time ago. There is no one, as far as I know, sifting through the poetry, fiction, and essays that have appeared, since the 1800s in periodicals or in volume form and drawing parallels between past and present, or rescuing works that have unjustly been forgotten. ' But literatures don't wait for others to come and do their job for them. The writers do it themselves. It's been done in the past- by Adil Jussawalla's New Writing in India (1974), Amit Chau- dhuri's The Picador Book ofModern Indian Literature (200 l), and 252 Partial Recall

troubles the jungle elephant this slip of a girl her teeth like sprouts of new rice her wrists stacked with bangles troubles me. Street Music: A Brief History

Eunice de Souzds Early Indian Poetry in English: 1829-1947 Hopkins, Andrez Wajda, Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Woody Guthrie, Laurel and Hardy. , (2005), and the essays of Nissim Ezekiel and Amit Chaudhuri- and it'll be done again. What Andrew Field in The Complection The list is long enough for ageing Indian academics, scuttling of Russian Literature (1971) said about Russian literature of the between metropolis and periphery, to cut their milk-teeth on. nineteenth century is true of ours in the twenty-first: OneAmerican scholar of Marathi, Philip Engblom, has this to say The best that has been said and thought about Russian literature has about it: 'The astonishing admixture (off the top of his head) not cornefiom the left hand of Russian writers themselves. In a society in only of nationalities but of artistic genres (symboliste poetry to which, during their lifetimes, Count Sollogub was more popular than art film to Mississippi and Chicago Blues to Marathi sants) speaks Nikolai Gogol and, in the 1880s, Seymon Nadson was generally volumes about the environment in which Kolatkar produced his declared a better poet than Pushkin, the steady voice and the keen own poetry.' . insight into the true nature of Russian literature have always belonged And not just Kolatkar. In the introduction to his Anthology of to the writers themselves, passing judgement (unheeded) on their Marathi Poetry: 1945-1965 (1967), in which some of Kolatkar's peers and predecessors. [Emphasis in original] * best known early poems like 'Woman' and 'Irani Restaurant Bombay' first appeared, Dilip Chitre writes about 'the paperback The bilingual poet Arun Kolatkar never wrote a critical essay revolution' which but had the 'keen insight'. Asked in 1977 by a Marathi magazine who his favourite poets and writers were, he replied, not with- unleashed a tremendous variety of. . . influences [that] ranged from out exasperation: classical Greek and Chinese to contemporary French, German, Spanish, Russian and Italian. The intellectual proletariat that was There are a lot of poets and writers I have liked. You want me to give the product of the rise in literacy was exposed to these diverse you a list? Whitman, Mardhekar, Manmohan, Eliot, Pound, Auden, influences. A pan-literary context was created. Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Kafia, Baudelaire, Heine, Catullus, Villon, Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Janabai, Eknath, Tukaram, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Han Shan, Ram Joshi, Honaji, Mandelstam, Dostoevsky, Cross-pollination bears strange fruits. [Bal Sitaram] Mardhekar wrote Gogol, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Babel, Apollinaire, Breton, Brecht, books on literary criticism and aesthetic theory which make references Neruda, Ginsberg, Barth, Duras, Joseph Heller, Gunter Grass, to contacts with various European works of art and literature . . . Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Nabokov, Namdev Dhasal, Patthe During his formative years as a writer, he was deeply influenced Bapurav, Rabelais, Apuleius, Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, Robert by Joyce and Eliot,. and these continued to be critical influences Shakley, Harlan Ellison, Bhalchandra Nemade, Durrenmatr, Arp, in his critical writing throughout his career, until his untimely death Cummings, Lewis Carroll, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, in 1956. Ted Hughes, Godse Bhatji, Morgenstern, Chakradhar, Gerard Manley The transnational environment (or 'many-sided cosmopolitan- Hopkins, Balwantbuva, Kierkegaard, Lenny Bruce, Bahinabai Chau- dhari, Kabir, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters,. Leadbelly, Howling ism' in Amit Chaudhuri's phrase) is one paradigm of the literary- Wolf, Jon Lee Hooker, Leiber and Stoller, Larry Williams, Lightning cultural world that the Indian writer, regardless of language, has 256 Partial Recall Street Music: A BriefHistory 257 inhabited for the past two hundred years. Bankimchandra up his books (at the rate ofabout one a day) mostly from the pave- Chattopadhyaya, in 'A Popular Literature for Bengal' (1870), was ment booksellers around Fl&a Fountain and at Strand Book Stall among the first to sense this: 'It is a fact that the best Bengali books in Bombay. We don't know where Shoshee Chunder got his from, are the productions of Bengalis who are highly cultivated English but when he was growing up Calcutta would have been awash scholars. The matter for regret is how few these books are, and how with books of all kinds, both imports and those produced locally. few the scholars who have written them.' Minus the regret, but As C.A. Bayly writes in Empire and Information (1999): at the same time turning it into something like a nostrum, the Official and missionary activities further swelled the huge numbers thought was echoed a hundred years later by A.K. Ramanujan in of books from Britain to India, which amounted in 1839 to 1,469 'On Bharati and His Prose Poems': s) cwt per annum. This matched exports to the US and British America (including the Caribbean). The boks may well have been missionary After the nineteenth century, no significant Indian writer lacks any ephemera; they may have been designed as ships' ballast or simply of the three traditions: the regional mother-tongue, the pan-Indian have sat on library shelves in European stations. But, combined with (Sanskritic, and in the case of Urdu and Kashmiri, the Perso-Arabic the products of the now substantial British and Indian printing as well), and the western (mostly English). Thus Indian modernity industries in Calcutta and other centres, the spread of the printed is a response not only to contemporary events but to at least three book in a subcontinent where it barely existed a generation before pasts. Poetic, not necessarily scholarly, assimilation of all these three was a striking effect of colonial rule. resources in various individual ways seems indispensable. . . The malaise and feebleness of some modern Indian poetry (in English as In the absence of international credit cards and Amazon.com, the well as in our mother-tongues) is traceable, I believe, to the weak latest books still had a way of getting around. If you lived, as I presence or total disconnection with one or another of these three do, in 'the interior', the 'bookwallah' rushed them to your door- resources. The strong presence of the three is certainly not sufficient, step just as FedEx does today. Bayly again: but it is necessary. The new knowledge spread faster than the printing press. Even a Beginning with our Ur-texts, those of the 1820s, 1830s, and petty rajah in the Banaras region had accumulated large collections 1840s, the poems of Derozio and the prose of Kylas Chunder Dutt of western books by the 1830s. He could not read English himself, and Shoshee Chunder Dutt for instance, we should ask ourselves but showed off his collection to a passing missionary as a token of what books and ideas fed into them; what the internationalism his broad-mindedness. Indian merchants had already set up networks of those times was and how it mixed with native literary traditions of hawkers to spread exotica and 'Europe goods' into,the interior. The 'bookwallah', or retail itinerant bookseller, soon appeared in on the one hand, ancl local sights and sounds on the other, to cre- response to the new demand for information as a commodity. ate a new modernity, a new vernacular literature which now goes by the unwieldy and still hostility-inducing name of Indian lite- Shoshee Chunder, who belonged to the distinguished Dutt rature in English. family of Calcutta, is all but forgotten by us, but in a forty-year Kolatkar, who, incidentally, had taught himselfsanskrit, picked writing career he published poems, a three-decker bildugnsroman 256 Partial Recall Street Music: A BriefHistory 257 inhabited for the past two hundred years. Bankimchandra up his books (at the rate ofabout one a day) mostly from the pave- Chattopadhyaya, in 'A Popular Literature for Bengal' (1870), was ment booksellers around Fl&a Fountain and at Strand Book Stall among the first to sense this: 'It is a fact that the best Bengali books in Bombay. We don't know where Shoshee Chunder got his from, are the productions of Bengalis who are highly cultivated English but when he was growing up Calcutta would have been awash scholars. The matter for regret is how few these books are, and how with books of all kinds, both imports and those produced locally. few the scholars who have written them.' Minus the regret, but As C.A. Bayly writes in Empire and Information (1999): at the same time turning it into something like a nostrum, the Official and missionary activities further swelled the huge numbers thought was echoed a hundred years later by A.K. Ramanujan in of books from Britain to India, which amounted in 1839 to 1,469 'On Bharati and His Prose Poems': s) cwt per annum. This matched exports to the US and British America (including the Caribbean). The boks may well have been missionary After the nineteenth century, no significant Indian writer lacks any ephemera; they may have been designed as ships' ballast or simply of the three traditions: the regional mother-tongue, the pan-Indian have sat on library shelves in European stations. But, combined with (Sanskritic, and in the case of Urdu and Kashmiri, the Perso-Arabic the products of the now substantial British and Indian printing as well), and the western (mostly English). Thus Indian modernity industries in Calcutta and other centres, the spread of the printed is a response not only to contemporary events but to at least three book in a subcontinent where it barely existed a generation before pasts. Poetic, not necessarily scholarly, assimilation of all these three was a striking effect of colonial rule. resources in various individual ways seems indispensable. . . The malaise and feebleness of some modern Indian poetry (in English as In the absence of international credit cards and Amazon.com, the well as in our mother-tongues) is traceable, I believe, to the weak latest books still had a way of getting around. If you lived, as I presence or total disconnection with one or another of these three do, in 'the interior', the 'bookwallah' rushed them to your door- resources. The strong presence of the three is certainly not sufficient, step just as FedEx does today. Bayly again: but it is necessary. The new knowledge spread faster than the printing press. Even a Beginning with our Ur-texts, those of the 1820s, 1830s, and petty rajah in the Banaras region had accumulated large collections 1840s, the poems of Derozio and the prose of Kylas Chunder Dutt of western books by the 1830s. He could not read English himself, and Shoshee Chunder Dutt for instance, we should ask ourselves but showed off his collection to a passing missionary as a token of what books and ideas fed into them; what the internationalism his broad-mindedness. Indian merchants had already set up networks of those times was and how it mixed with native literary traditions of hawkers to spread exotica and 'Europe goods' into,the interior. The 'bookwallah', or retail itinerant bookseller, soon appeared in on the one hand, ancl local sights and sounds on the other, to cre- response to the new demand for information as a commodity. ate a new modernity, a new vernacular literature which now goes by the unwieldy and still hostility-inducing name of Indian lite- Shoshee Chunder, who belonged to the distinguished Dutt rature in English. family of Calcutta, is all but forgotten by us, but in a forty-year Kolatkar, who, incidentally, had taught himselfsanskrit, picked writing career he published poems, a three-decker bildugnsroman 258 Partial Recall Street Music: A BriefHistory 259 titled The %ungZemindar ( 1883), short fiction, essays, and hist- reflections. The Works ofShoshee Chunder Dutt Series I, Historical orical accounts, and even forayed into the new field of ethnogra- andMiscellaneous was published in six volumes by Lovell Reeve in \ Apart from the ethnological work The Wild Tvibes of India 1884. The following year, the year in which he died at the age of (1882), which he published, as he did also The YoungZemindar, 6 1, a further four volumes appeared, The WorksofShosheeChunder under a wild pseudonym, Horatio Bickerstaffe Rowney, the only Dutt Series 2, Imaginative, Descriptive, and Metrical. They remain other book of his that seems to be in print is SelectionsfFom unread. The next time we stop before a mirror, we should reflect 'Bengaliana' (2005), or Bengaliana, A dish of Rice and Curry, and on Shoshee's fate and perhaps see in it a description of our own. Other Indigestible Ingredients (1877), to ave its original title. The years from 1824 (when Shoshee Chunder was born) to, There are many reasons why we should read Shoshee Chunder, roughly, 1845 (when he published 'The Republic of Orissa: A the pleasure afforded by his prose being not the least of them. He Page from the Annals of the Twentieth Century', which tells the had an observant mind that was interested in different things story of an armed uprising by rhe tribal Kingaries against the (a fox rather than a hedgehog in Isaiah Berlin's famous distinc- British), coincided with a period of intellectual ferment that India tion), and though he wrote considerable quantities ofverse, prose has not known since. At its centre, although he died in 1831, was was the medium he best expressed it in. If the Mughal emperor the Hindu College lecturer Henry Derozio. His ability to attract Babur advised his young son Humayun to avoid obfuscation in worshipful students and at the same time be the focus of intense writing ('From now on write with uncomplicated, clear, and hostility, his radical ideas and the suffering it brought him, puts plain words'), Shoshee Chunder told his young nephew Romesh one in mind of the twelfth-century French scholastic philosopher Chunder Dutt about 'independence of character and thirst for Peter Abelard. 'I was then summoned and came at once before the literary fame'. Council. Without any questioning or discussion they compelled The idea of literary fame, which would have meant something me to throw my book [his treatise on theTrinity] into the fire with very different when manuscripts had to be copied by hand, is link- my own hands, and so it was burnt', Abelard writes in Historia ed crucially to the print culture that colonialism introduced. Calamitatum. Derozio, summoned before the Hindu College To see one's name in a newspaper that thousands of educated Committee and accused of being a corrupter of youth, was households read first thing in the morning; to see it on the spine forthwith dismissed from service. He died of cholera shortly ofa title that would continue to be available, as [he English authors afterwards, aged twenty-two, without having written his Historia were, long after one was dead: this was fame. Importantly, the Calamitatum or 'The Story of His Misfortunes'. He did though large number of newspapers and journals being printed in Cal- send a letter to the college authorities, denying that he ever cutta-almost 200 in the period 1780-1 857-led to a demand preached atheism or recommended marriages between brothers for new kinds of writing. It was an opportunity that Shoshee and sisters. Rut whereas Abelard and Heloise have passed into Chunderseized, turningout asteadystream ofreportage, autobio- European consciousness, Derozio is hardly studied outside Ben- graphical essays, opinion pieces, social commentary, and political gal, and then too only by those who are interested in such arcane 258 Partial Recall Street Music: A BriefHistory 259 titled The %ungZemindar ( 1883), short fiction, essays, and hist- reflections. The Works ofShoshee Chunder Dutt Series I, Historical orical accounts, and even forayed into the new field of ethnogra- andMiscellaneous was published in six volumes by Lovell Reeve in \ Apart from the ethnological work The Wild Tvibes of India 1884. The following year, the year in which he died at the age of (1882), which he published, as he did also The YoungZemindar, 6 1, a further four volumes appeared, The WorksofShosheeChunder under a wild pseudonym, Horatio Bickerstaffe Rowney, the only Dutt Series 2, Imaginative, Descriptive, and Metrical. They remain other book of his that seems to be in print is SelectionsfFom unread. The next time we stop before a mirror, we should reflect 'Bengaliana' (2005), or Bengaliana, A dish of Rice and Curry, and on Shoshee's fate and perhaps see in it a description of our own. Other Indigestible Ingredients (1877), to ave its original title. The years from 1824 (when Shoshee Chunder was born) to, There are many reasons why we should read Shoshee Chunder, roughly, 1845 (when he published 'The Republic of Orissa: A the pleasure afforded by his prose being not the least of them. He Page from the Annals of the Twentieth Century', which tells the had an observant mind that was interested in different things story of an armed uprising by rhe tribal Kingaries against the (a fox rather than a hedgehog in Isaiah Berlin's famous distinc- British), coincided with a period of intellectual ferment that India tion), and though he wrote considerable quantities ofverse, prose has not known since. At its centre, although he died in 1831, was was the medium he best expressed it in. If the Mughal emperor the Hindu College lecturer Henry Derozio. His ability to attract Babur advised his young son Humayun to avoid obfuscation in worshipful students and at the same time be the focus of intense writing ('From now on write with uncomplicated, clear, and hostility, his radical ideas and the suffering it brought him, puts plain words'), Shoshee Chunder told his young nephew Romesh one in mind of the twelfth-century French scholastic philosopher Chunder Dutt about 'independence of character and thirst for Peter Abelard. 'I was then summoned and came at once before the literary fame'. Council. Without any questioning or discussion they compelled The idea of literary fame, which would have meant something me to throw my book [his treatise on theTrinity] into the fire with very different when manuscripts had to be copied by hand, is link- my own hands, and so it was burnt', Abelard writes in Historia ed crucially to the print culture that colonialism introduced. Calamitatum. Derozio, summoned before the Hindu College To see one's name in a newspaper that thousands of educated Committee and accused of being a corrupter of youth, was households read first thing in the morning; to see it on the spine forthwith dismissed from service. He died of cholera shortly ofa title that would continue to be available, as [he English authors afterwards, aged twenty-two, without having written his Historia were, long after one was dead: this was fame. Importantly, the Calamitatum or 'The Story of His Misfortunes'. He did though large number of newspapers and journals being printed in Cal- send a letter to the college authorities, denying that he ever cutta-almost 200 in the period 1780-1 857-led to a demand preached atheism or recommended marriages between brothers for new kinds of writing. It was an opportunity that Shoshee and sisters. Rut whereas Abelard and Heloise have passed into Chunderseized, turningout asteadystream ofreportage, autobio- European consciousness, Derozio is hardly studied outside Ben- graphical essays, opinion pieces, social commentary, and political gal, and then too only by those who are interested in such arcane Street Music: A BriefHistory 260 Partial Recall 261 Most of those who had received their education in the Hindu College, subjects as early-nineteenth-century Indian poetry in English. and the other seminaries in Calcutta, were fired with the desire to do Derozio, Poet of India: The Dejnitive Edition, edited by Rosinka away with everything that was old and embrace everything that was Chaudhuri, appeared in 2008, and while anywhere else it would new. 'Cast off your prejudices, and be free in your thoughts and have been hailed as a literary event, here the book attracted some actions,' was their watchword; and there was at the time a new force interest in Kolkata but was otherwise ignored by the national at work to foster this independent spirit. media. If parochialism runs deep in India, literary parochialism Stirring reports of the French Revolution reached their ears. Some runs deeper. of their English frie,nds expressed sympathy with the movement; and Sivanath Sastri's Bengali classic Ramtanu Lahiri 0 Tatkalin such works in English literature as advocated its course were placed within their reach. No wonder then that they soon became thorough Bangasamaj (1903) tells of Derozio's influence on those whom revolutionists, and were resolved to lay the axe at the root of every- he taught. Derozio, he writes, thing that savoured of ignorance and superstition. The orthodox

9' ' customs of the country were run down wholesale by them; and the introduced a new epoch in the intellectual and moral history of Ben- cry they raised was: 'Break down everything old, and rear in its stead gal, and moulded, when they were boys, the character of men like what is new.' I Ramtanu Lahiri, Krishnamohan Banerji, Ram Krishna Mullick, Dakhinaranjan Mukerji and Ram Gopal Ghosh. Though he taught 'The Republic of Orissa' came out of this intellectual churning; the fourth class alone, he was friendly with almost all the students of more specifically, out of a young literary tradition of which its the college. author was acutely aware. Behind it lay Kylas Chunder Dutt's 'A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of theyear 1945' (1835), which for Mr Derozio's house had a great attraction for these young lads. There the first time in fiction spoke about Indian Independence, pro- they learnt much and enjoyed much. Ideas quite novel were so jecting the year of Independence a century into the future. Kylas presented before their minds that they could easily grasp them. Not Chunder's story takes place in an imagined time, 1945, but the only were their intellects sharpened, but their views with regard to space in which it takes place is real and filled with recognizable their moral duties too were expanded under his influence. The people. Chitpore Road and the Esplanade are mentioned by hitherto imprepable stronghold of prejudice and superstition was name, and the 'splendidly attired' Derozian protagonist Bhoobun adroitly attacked by him; and Hindu lads, brought up from infancy in the belief that the society of a Christian is contaminating, and Mohan, addressing a meeting of rebels 'with all the learning that the food touched by him or prepared in his house is so defiling and eloquence which the Anglo-Indian College could furnish', is as to hurl him who ate it to the lowest depths of hell, broke asunder a character straight out of one of the debating associations that the shackles of caste, and freely ate with their Eurasian friend. (Trans- had sprung up all across Calcutta in the 1820s and 1830s. Italo lation by Roper Lethbridge) Calvino says somewhere that for the fabulous to be effective

Sastri follows this with a vivid description of what it was like to it must be gounded in a recognizable reality; before jam can be be young in Calcutta in 1828, two years after Derozio was ap- applied, he says, you need to have a slice of bread first. As a pointed to the college: practitioner of the storyteller's art, Kylas Chunder seems to have 262 Partial Recall Street Music A BriefHistory 263 known this instinctively; he also seems to have passed on this The use of the inventory (birds made of coloured rags, paperpal- knowledge to Shoshee, who was his cousin. kees, umbrellas, trees, flowers, whistles, balloons, looking-glasses, Those who have written about 'The Republic of Orissa', like 'everything in fact'), the focus on the familiar and ephemeral, the Meenakshi Mukherjee in The Perishable Empire (2000) and inevitable juxtapositions, are literary techniques that we asso- Priyamvada Gopal in The Indian English Novel (2009), have ciate more with the 'high' modernists than with a mid-nineteenth- largely dwelt on its anti-colonial ideas, ignoring the fact that century Indian writer whom few have heard about and fewer still besides the vanilla flavour of nationalism there are other flavours have read. in it, reflecting the range of materials, both intellectual and com- If 'The Street Music of Calcutta' has identifiable Indian for- monplace, distant and near at hand, that Shoshee drew upon. bears, one of them has to be Kaliprasanna Sinha's Bengali classic One morning in Allahabad, I saw a man standing outside my Hutom Pyancher Naksha, first published in 1861 and translated house and crying ' Tootiplastic ki balti banane wala'. He was offer- into English as The Observant Ozul (2008). Written in demotic ing to repair broken plastic buckets. On other mornid&, a differ- Bangla that uses slang liberally and is as much larded with English ent man with a different cry offers to repair the gas hob. And in words and phrases as Kipling's English is with Hindustani, it's a New Delhi's Greater Kailash I once passed a man dragging two satirical description of nineteenth-century Calcutta, particularly long strips of bamboo behind him, crying 'Naali saaf kara lo', during the time ofits festivals and pujas, when the city, as it were, Get your blocked drains cleaned. I've been hearing street cries for lets its hair down. By turning his shrewd eye on Calcutta's polyg- as long as I can remember, but I began to hear them more keenly lot citizens, the new breed of urban Bengalis, the more fashion- after coming across, in Bengaliana, 'The Street Music ofcalcutta'. able among them dressed in ~inea~plechapkans and wearing their It records thirty-two street cries, each followed by a wry comment. hair Albert-style, eating 'rolls' instead of 'coarse rotis', Kaliprasanna Here is one: gives us a composite picture of the restless, fast-changing metropolis itself. We meet roguish men who are out to make a fast buck TOOK-TAP,TOOK-TOOM off those who've already made a fast buck (one vet treated malaria

Play-things to sell! What a crowd of ragged children follow in the fever by boring holes into his patients' nostrils 'as if they were wake of the seller; all anxious to buy, but having no pice to pay! And bulls'); women, significantly, are absent from the city ofsin unless what a variety of nicknacks the man has got; birds made of coloured they happen to be whores or shrews; the streets resound with rags and decked with tinsel, paperpalkees,gharries, umbrellas, trees, the cries of hawkers and peddlers. The cries tell you a lot about flowers, whistles, bells, cards, balloons, looking-glasses; everything the Calcutta of the time, from the price offish to what the people in fact, that is likely to catch a child's fancy. With villainous pertinacity were reading: these are displayed ostentatiously at every door. In vain the mothers tell the man to pass on, not having the pice to pay for what their 'The [compartment] doors shut with a loud thud. Muslim boys children clamorously ask for. The man knows that the pice will be went around hawking the daily papers: "Want The Harkam, Sir?" forthcoming, and generally succeeds in getting it out. "The Daily News, Sir?" Chachas with coarse red stoles slung over 262 Partial Recall Street Music A BriefHistory 263 known this instinctively; he also seems to have passed on this The use of the inventory (birds made of coloured rags, paperpal- knowledge to Shoshee, who was his cousin. kees, umbrellas, trees, flowers, whistles, balloons, looking-glasses, Those who have written about 'The Republic of Orissa', like 'everything in fact'), the focus on the familiar and ephemeral, the Meenakshi Mukherjee in The Perishable Empire (2000) and inevitable juxtapositions, are literary techniques that we asso- Priyamvada Gopal in The Indian English Novel (2009), have ciate more with the 'high' modernists than with a mid-nineteenth- largely dwelt on its anti-colonial ideas, ignoring the fact that century Indian writer whom few have heard about and fewer still besides the vanilla flavour of nationalism there are other flavours have read. in it, reflecting the range of materials, both intellectual and com- If 'The Street Music of Calcutta' has identifiable Indian for- monplace, distant and near at hand, that Shoshee drew upon. bears, one of them has to be Kaliprasanna Sinha's Bengali classic One morning in Allahabad, I saw a man standing outside my Hutom Pyancher Naksha, first published in 1861 and translated house and crying ' Tootiplastic ki balti banane wala'. He was offer- into English as The Observant Ozul (2008). Written in demotic ing to repair broken plastic buckets. On other mornid&, a differ- Bangla that uses slang liberally and is as much larded with English ent man with a different cry offers to repair the gas hob. And in words and phrases as Kipling's English is with Hindustani, it's a New Delhi's Greater Kailash I once passed a man dragging two satirical description of nineteenth-century Calcutta, particularly long strips of bamboo behind him, crying 'Naali saaf kara lo', during the time ofits festivals and pujas, when the city, as it were, Get your blocked drains cleaned. I've been hearing street cries for lets its hair down. By turning his shrewd eye on Calcutta's polyg- as long as I can remember, but I began to hear them more keenly lot citizens, the new breed of urban Bengalis, the more fashion- after coming across, in Bengaliana, 'The Street Music ofcalcutta'. able among them dressed in ~inea~plechapkans and wearing their It records thirty-two street cries, each followed by a wry comment. hair Albert-style, eating 'rolls' instead of 'coarse rotis', Kaliprasanna Here is one: gives us a composite picture of the restless, fast-changing metropolis itself. We meet roguish men who are out to make a fast buck TOOK-TAP,TOOK-TOOM off those who've already made a fast buck (one vet treated malaria

their shoulders went around selling books-"Novels, good novels!" This is the city at evening. 'In the morning', Bankim says, 'the Tununang, tununang, the bells sounded again.' scene is changed':

The chapter from which this extract is taken, 'The Railways', Ding-dong, ding-dong, sounds the clock in the Church. It is four in could well be the earliest description in Indian literature of travel- the morning, and night-wandering Babus have turned their faces homewards. Oorya Brahmins are at work on the flour-mills. Street- ling by this revolutionary mode of transport. We don't know lamps are growing faint. Light breezes are blowing. Quails are singing which 'good novels' the chachas (which is Hindustani for uncle; in the verandas of the night-houses. But for this, or when the crows being mostly Muslim, the hawkers were addressed as chachas) begin to caw, or a street dog occasionally barks for want of something were selling in 1861, but the demand for them was steady enough else to do, the city is still silent. for A.H. Wheeler & Co. to launch from Allahabad in 1888 the Indian Railway Library. Its first six titles, all priced at one rupee, It's a pity that Bankim did not rans slate more Bangla prose. As were by Kipling. for the collocation of morning time, crow, street dog, and city, Even forebears have forebears. One of the books Bankim we shall encounter it again in Arun Kolatkar. praises in 'Bengali Literature' (1871) is Hutom Pyancher Naksha, Kaliprasanna Sinha and Shoshee Chunder Dutt were not the which he describes as 'a collection of sketches of city-life, some- only people, in the mid nineteenth century, who were listening to thing, after the manner of Dickens' Sketches by Roz, in which the and recording street cries. Some of their older contemporaries like follies and peculiarities of all classes, and not seldom of men actu- the journalist and writer Henry Mayhew (1812-87) in London ally living, are described in racy vigorous language, not seldom and the colonial lexicographer S.W. Fallon (1817-80) in the disfigured by obscenity.' Bankim, like Marianne Moore, understood districts of North India were doing so too. Shoshee hasn't left us that the best form of criticism is quotation. In the same essay, he a list of his favourite poets and writers, but had he been asked for translates a longish 'scene' from Hutom, one that hums with a one it would have been as long, as revealing, and as cosmopolitan variety of street music: as the one that Kolatkar gave his Marathi interviewer. If Shoshee Chunder was the proto-flineur of Indian literature,

Fishwomen in the decaying Sobha Bazar market are selling-lamps Kolatkar is surely its flineur incarnate. In the hundred and more in hand-their stores of putrid fish and salted hilstr, and coaxing years that separate them, the Calcutta toy seller's gentle 'took took' purchasers by calling out. 'You fellow with the napkin on your had become the Boomtown Lepers' Band's 'boom boom': shoulder, will you buy some fine fish?' 'You fellow with a moustache Traap a boom chaka like a broom, will you pay four annas?' Some one, anxious to display shh chaka boom tap his gallantry, is rewarded by hearing something unpleasant of his ancestors. Smokers of madat and ganjah, and drunkards who hme Ladies and gentlemen (crash), drunk their last pice, are bawling out, 'Generous men, pity a poor here comes (bang), here comes (boom) blind Brahman,' and so procure the wherewithal for a new debauch. here comes the Boomtown Lepers' Band, 264 Pizrtial Recall Street Music: A Brief History 265

their shoulders went around selling books-"Novels, good novels!" This is the city at evening. 'In the morning', Bankim says, 'the Tununang, tununang, the bells sounded again.' scene is changed':

Fishwomen in the decaying Sobha Bazar market are selling-lamps Kolatkar is surely its flineur incarnate. In the hundred and more in hand-their stores of putrid fish and salted hilstr, and coaxing years that separate them, the Calcutta toy seller's gentle 'took took' purchasers by calling out. 'You fellow with the napkin on your had become the Boomtown Lepers' Band's 'boom boom': shoulder, will you buy some fine fish?' 'You fellow with a moustache Traap a boom chaka like a broom, will you pay four annas?' Some one, anxious to display shh chaka boom tap his gallantry, is rewarded by hearing something unpleasant of his ancestors. Smokers of madat and ganjah, and drunkards who hme Ladies and gentlemen (crash), drunk their last pice, are bawling out, 'Generous men, pity a poor here comes (bang), here comes (boom) blind Brahman,' and so procure the wherewithal for a new debauch. here comes the Boomtown Lepers' Band, 266 Partial Recall Street Music: A Brief History 267 drumsticks and maracas tied to their hands Kala Ghoda Poems opens with a morning scene similar to bandaged in silk and the finest of gauze, the one quoted above from Hutom Pyancher Naksha, but seen and clutching tambourines in scaly paws. through the narrowed eyes of a pi-dog:

Traap a boom chaka This is the time of day I like best, shh chaka boom tap and this the hour Whack. when I can call this city my own; ('The Boomtown Lepers' Band') when I like nothing better than to lie down here, at the exact centre A few weeks before he died in September 2004, as we were on of this traffic island our way by taxi from Prabhadevi where he lived to Cafk Military, Kolatkar, looking out of the taxi window and then at me, remarked (or trisland as I call it for short, ' on his English and Marathi oeuvres. With the exception of Sarpa and also to suggest Satra, he said, his stance in 'the boatride', jejuri, and Kala Gboda a triangular island with rounded corners) Poems (in which 'The Boomtown Lepers' Band' appears) had been that doubles as a parking lot that of an observer; he was on the outside looking in. He wonder- on working days, ed whether he'd have gone on writing the same way if he'd lived a corral for more than fifty cars, for another ten years. The Marathi books, on the other hand, when it's deserted early in the morning, were all quite different, he said, and there was no obvious thread and I'm the only sign connecting Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita, Chirimiri, and Bhijki Ehi. of intelligent life on the planet; But there's something else, too, that links 'the boatride', Jejuri, the concrete surface hard, flat and cool and Kala Ghoda Poems. Each of them is arranged in the cyclic against my belly, shape of the Ouroboros, their last lines suggestingly leading to my lower jaw at rest on crossed forepaws; their opening ones. Jejuri begins with .'daybreak' and ends with just about where the equestrian statue the 'setting sun/ large as a wheel'. Similarly, Kala Ghoda Poems of what's-his-name begins with a 'traffic island' 'deserted early in the morning' and must've stood once, or so I imagine. ends with the 'silence of the night', the 'traffic lights' 'like ill- ('Pi-dog 1') starred lovers/ fated never to meet'. In 'the boatride', the boat jockeys 'away/ from the landing' and returns to the same spot As the pi-dog wakes up, the city of Bombay emblematized on its when the ride is over. It will fill up with tourists and set off again, body ('I look a bit like/ a seventeenth-century map of Bombay1 just as the state transport bus in Jejuri, at the end of the 'bumpy with its seven islands// not joined yet, shown in solid black/ on ride', will deliver a fresh batch of 'live, ready to eat' pilgrims to the a body the colour of old parchment'), 'Mr Crow' prepares to temple priest. build his nest: 266 Partial Recall Street Music: A Brief History 267 drumsticks and maracas tied to their hands Kala Ghoda Poems opens with a morning scene similar to bandaged in silk and the finest of gauze, the one quoted above from Hutom Pyancher Naksha, but seen and clutching tambourines in scaly paws. through the narrowed eyes of a pi-dog:

Traap a boom chaka This is the time of day I like best, shh chaka boom tap and this the hour Whack. when I can call this city my own; ('The Boomtown Lepers' Band') when I like nothing better than to lie down here, at the exact centre A few weeks before he died in September 2004, as we were on of this traffic island our way by taxi from Prabhadevi where he lived to Cafk Military, Kolatkar, looking out of the taxi window and then at me, remarked (or trisland as I call it for short, ' on his English and Marathi oeuvres. With the exception of Sarpa and also to suggest Satra, he said, his stance in 'the boatride', jejuri, and Kala Gboda a triangular island with rounded corners) Poems (in which 'The Boomtown Lepers' Band' appears) had been that doubles as a parking lot that of an observer; he was on the outside looking in. He wonder- on working days, ed whether he'd have gone on writing the same way if he'd lived a corral for more than fifty cars, for another ten years. The Marathi books, on the other hand, when it's deserted early in the morning, were all quite different, he said, and there was no obvious thread and I'm the only sign connecting Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita, Chirimiri, and Bhijki Ehi. of intelligent life on the planet; But there's something else, too, that links 'the boatride', Jejuri, the concrete surface hard, flat and cool and Kala Ghoda Poems. Each of them is arranged in the cyclic against my belly, shape of the Ouroboros, their last lines suggestingly leading to my lower jaw at rest on crossed forepaws; their opening ones. Jejuri begins with .'daybreak' and ends with just about where the equestrian statue the 'setting sun/ large as a wheel'. Similarly, Kala Ghoda Poems of what's-his-name begins with a 'traffic island' 'deserted early in the morning' and must've stood once, or so I imagine. ends with the 'silence of the night', the 'traffic lights' 'like ill- ('Pi-dog 1') starred lovers/ fated never to meet'. In 'the boatride', the boat jockeys 'away/ from the landing' and returns to the same spot As the pi-dog wakes up, the city of Bombay emblematized on its when the ride is over. It will fill up with tourists and set off again, body ('I look a bit like/ a seventeenth-century map of Bombay1 just as the state transport bus in Jejuri, at the end of the 'bumpy with its seven islands// not joined yet, shown in solid black/ on ride', will deliver a fresh batch of 'live, ready to eat' pilgrims to the a body the colour of old parchment'), 'Mr Crow' prepares to temple priest. build his nest: Partial Recall Street Music: A Brief History skip a few thousand years A twig! A twig! A twig! A twig! A twig! and pick up a work of science fantasy You got it! You got it! You got it! -Harlan Ellison's 'A Boy and his Dog' . It's all yours, now. . . ('Pi-dog 5') YOUcan take it away any time you want. Located in the vestibule of the David Sassoon Library and But fi rst, examine it. Reading Room, across the road from where that colonial relic, 'the equestrian statue/ of what's-his-name' stood (it's the statue of Bite it. EdwardVII and has been removed 'to the zoo'), is the statue of 'the Is it going to bite you back? merchant prince/ of Bombay', David Sassoon. He is a flaneur Pick it up and drop it down. carved in stone, observing Kala Ghoda from the pedestal, much Caw! as Kolatkar, with an unobstructea view of the traffic island and seemingly idling away the hours, did from the vantage-point of ('To a Crow') his favorite restaurant, Wayside Inn:

By the time you get to the end of the book, a procession of I find myself cast in a role I detest; characters, drawn from all points ofthe compass, from 'Bandagere/ that of an observer, in Andhra Pradesh' to 'a smokehouse in Alaska', has passed a spectator, through Kala Ghoda. Kolatkar's vision is inclusive, so while Kala reduced to making faces, Ghoda is a specific place, it is also all places, just as, half asleep 'at rolling his eyes, the exact centre/ of the traffic island', the pi-dog is a specific dog and sticking his tongue out occasionally and at the same time it is all dogs: at this city that gets more and more unrecognizable On my father's side with every passing year. the line goes back to the dog that followed Yudhish thira ('David Sassoon 7') Earlier, in 'David Sassoon 3', Kolatkar gives us the year of on his last journey, and stayed with him till the very end'. Sassoon's death, 1867, as well as the year in which he wrote the poem, 1985. He smiled mischievously when he told me that both dates were 'according to the Hebrew calendar':

To find a more moving instance I died in the year, of man's devotion to dog, let me see now, was it we have to leave the realm of history, five thousand six hundred and twenty-four? Partial Recall Street Music: A Brief History skip a few thousand years A twig! A twig! A twig! A twig! A twig! and pick up a work of science fantasy You got it! You got it! You got it! -Harlan Ellison's 'A Boy and his Dog' . It's all yours, now. . . ('Pi-dog 5') YOUcan take it away any time you want. Located in the vestibule of the David Sassoon Library and But fi rst, examine it. Reading Room, across the road from where that colonial relic, 'the equestrian statue/ of what's-his-name' stood (it's the statue of Bite it. EdwardVII and has been removed 'to the zoo'), is the statue of 'the Is it going to bite you back? merchant prince/ of Bombay', David Sassoon. He is a flaneur Pick it up and drop it down. carved in stone, observing Kala Ghoda from the pedestal, much Caw! as Kolatkar, with an unobstructea view of the traffic island and seemingly idling away the hours, did from the vantage-point of ('To a Crow') his favorite restaurant, Wayside Inn:

To find a more moving instance I died in the year, of man's devotion to dog, let me see now, was it we have to leave the realm of history, five thousand six hundred and twenty-four? 270 Partial Recall Street Music: A BriefHistory 27 1

-according to the Hebrew calendar, of course. Before it appeared in Bengaliana, 'The Street Music of Cal- And what year is this now? cutta' had come out in Mookerjee? Magazine. Edited by Sambhu Five thousand seven hundred and forty- Chandra Mukhopadhyaya, this remarkable journal, like The six or something? Modern Review and so much else, has been forgotten by Indian Good lord, has it been that long literature. Modelled partly on Gentleman? Magazine, in much since I had a fuck? the same way that Civil Lines was modelled on Granta, it said in the Prospectus that announced the magazine's New Series in 'All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena,' Baudelaire 1872: 'Our Magazine . . . will be a receptacle of all descriptions wrote in 'The Salon of 1846', 'have within them something eter- of knowledge and literature, Poetry, the Drama, firs de sociPtP, nal and something transitory-an absolute and a particular ele- Criticism, Prose Fiction, Sketches, Philosophy, Politics and Socio- ment. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is logy, Political Economy, Cornmeice and Banking, Jurisprudence nothing but an abstract notion, creamed off from the general and ~a&,Science and Art, History and Biography, Antiquities, surface of different types of beauty.' In a later essay, 'The Painter Geography, Travels, Oriental Literature, Manners and Customs, of Modern Life', which, though it is on Constantin Guys, can in Sporting, in the manifold forms of story, song, sketch, essay, fact be read as a gloss on K~latkar'swork, Baudelaire hrther causerie, &c,' Essays like 'The Street Music of Calcutta' and 'Ben- refined the idea, associating the 'transitory' with the 'modern': gali Literature' might not have been written had receptive journals 'Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one like Mookerjee? Magazine and Calcutta Review not been around. half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.' By Incidentally, a frequent contributor of verse to Mookerjeei Maga- giving 'Five thousand seven hundred and forty-/ six or something?' zine was Ram Sharma. All things considered, the Indian writer in as the answer to his question, 'And what year is this now?' Kolatkar, 20 10, though successful as never before, is far worse off than he the observer of the city, the flAneur, was nailing the 'modern', the was in the 1870s. It's just as well that he's unaware of the paradox. 'contingent', leaving the other half, 'the eternal and the immovable', to look after itself.

Kolatkar never sent out his poems to magazines, or, for that matter, his books to ~ublishers,of whom he had a lifelong dread. The occasional poem that appeared in a magazine-damn you, Dionysus, Poetry India, Kavi, ChandrabhZgZ-was invariablysome- thing that an editor had solicited. One by one, these little magazines shut down, leaving a vacuum that is still unfilled. 270 Partial Recall Street Music: A BriefHistory 27 1

'cordin to my rules listen baby i get paid when i say so What is an Indian Poem? The language (it is more a patois) of the first poem is Bombay- Hindi; of the translation American English. Both poems are by Arun Kolatkar; 'main manager ko bola', which was written in Here are two poems. The language of the first, which I have 1960, is part of a sequence of three poems, all written in the same transcribed in the Roman alphabet, is not English. However, it patois. The sequence, which does not have a title, first appeared uses English words-'manager', 'company', 'rule', 'table', 'police', in a Marathi little magazine and subsequently, in 1977, in Kolat- 'complaint'-that readers will recognize. If one keeps only the kar's first collection of Marathi pokms. In English, Kolatkar titled English words and erases the rest, the poem will resemble a Sap- the sequence 'Three Cups of Tea'. Occasionally, Kolatkar trans- phic fragment. lated his Marathi poems into English, but he mostly kept the two main manager ko bola mujhe pagaar mangta hai separate. Sometimes he wondered what the connection between manager bola company ke rule se pagaar ek tarikh ko milega them was, or if there was any connection at all. uski ghadi table pay padi thi Kolatkar created two very different bodies of work, both of maine ghadi uthake liya equal distinction and importance, in two languages. The achieve- aur manager ko police chowki ka rasta dikhaya ment, I think, has few parallels in world literature. What has a bola agar complaint karna hai to karlo parallel, at least in India, is that he drew, in his work, on a multi- mere rule se pagaar ajhee hoga plicity of literary traditions. He drew on the Marathi of course, The second poem is a translation of the first: and Sanskrit, which he knew; he drew on the English and Ameri- i want my pay i said can traditions, specially Black American music and speech to the manager (' 'cordin to my rules/ listen baby/ I get paid when is say so'); and you'll get paid said he drew on the European tradition. He drew on a few others the manager besides. As he said in an interview once, talking about poets, 'Any- but not before the first thing might swim into their ken.' don't you know the rules? Fortunately, in Kolatkar's case, we know something about that coolly I picked up his 'Anything'. While going through his papers in Bombay, after his wrist watch that lay on his table death in September 2004, I came across a typed sheet in which he wanna bring in the cops had put down a chronology of his life. In it, against each year, i said he gave the name of the advertising agency he worked for at the 274 Partial Recall What is an Indian Poem? 275 , time (Ajanta, National, Press Syndicate); the area of Bombay he Moravia. It was published by Jonathan Williams in 1960. What lived in (Malad, Sion, A Road); illnesses, if any; and the poems he is striking about Harold Norse's translation is the idiom in which wrote, both English and Marathi. That is how we know when he he translates rornanesco, the Roman dialect, perhaps not unlike wrote 'main manager ko bola'. He also gave the names of the Bombay-Hindi, in which Belli wrote his sonnets. Here is the authors he read that year. Against 1965, he mentions the follow- opening sentence of Williams' preface: ing: 'Snyder, Williams, Villon, Lautreamont, Catullus, Belli, Apollinaire, Morgenstern, Berryman, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Li Po, Gogol wanted to do the job, and D.H. Lawrence, each into his own Cold Mountain'. Cold Mountain is not the name of an author language but they were written not into the classic language Italian but the title of a book of translations of the Chinese poet Han that scholars were familiar with, but the Roman dialect that gave them an intimate tang which was their major charm and which the Shan, whom, incidentally, Gary Snyder also translated. illustrious names spoken of above.could not equal. 'Art', Ezra Pound said, 'does not exist in a vacuum.' And Claude Lkvi-Strauss, 'Whether one knows it or not, one never walks Coming to Norse's translation, Williams says alone along the path of creativity.' Kolatkar's list of authors, which appears to be random, is in These translations are not made into English but into the American fact a capsule biography, a life of the life of the mind. Show me idiom in which they appear in the same relationship facing English your books and 1'11 tell you who you are. It's a mind that could as the original Roman dialect does to classic Italian. move with ease from first-century BCE Italy to eighth century China to fifteenth-century France to twentieth-century America, 'Three Cups ofTed first appeared in Saleem Peeradina's antho- while at the same time picking up the language spoken in the logy Contemporary Indian Poetry in English in 1972. The antho- backstreets of Bombay, a slice of which he offers, without com- logy was the first to represent the new Indian poetry in English ment, in 'main manager ko bola'. But that said, the names of and 'Three Cups ofTea' has been a part of the canon since. I don't poets that appear in the list are not in themselves surprising. We have a date for when Kolatkar made the translation, but I suspect were all reading the same or similar things in Bombay (or Allaha- I it was made after 1965, which is after his discovery of Norse's Belli bad) in 1965. There is, however, one exception, and that is Belli. and the American demotic Norse employs to translate romanesco: Though his name belongs among the greatest in nineteenth- 'If ya wanna be funny, it's enough to be/ A gentleman.' century European literature, he is known to very few, even in So there'it is, your Indian poem. It was written in a Bombay Italy. In the mid 1960s, there was only one English translation of patois by a poet who otherwise wrote in Marathi and English. It this poet around, and it's the one Kolatkar must have read. The then became part of two literatures, Marathi and Indian English, translation is by Harold Norse and is called The Roman Sonnets but entered the latter in a translation made in the American idiom, of G.G. Belli. It has a preface by William Carlos Williams (a name one ofwhose sources, or, ifyou will, inspirations, was an American that also figures in Kolatkar's list) and an introduction by Alberto translation of a nineteenth-century Roman poet. 274 Partial Recall What is an Indian Poem? 275 , time (Ajanta, National, Press Syndicate); the area of Bombay he Moravia. It was published by Jonathan Williams in 1960. What lived in (Malad, Sion, A Road); illnesses, if any; and the poems he is striking about Harold Norse's translation is the idiom in which wrote, both English and Marathi. That is how we know when he he translates rornanesco, the Roman dialect, perhaps not unlike wrote 'main manager ko bola'. He also gave the names of the Bombay-Hindi, in which Belli wrote his sonnets. Here is the authors he read that year. Against 1965, he mentions the follow- opening sentence of Williams' preface: ing: 'Snyder, Williams, Villon, Lautreamont, Catullus, Belli, Apollinaire, Morgenstern, Berryman, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Li Po, Gogol wanted to do the job, and D.H. Lawrence, each into his own Cold Mountain'. Cold Mountain is not the name of an author language but they were written not into the classic language Italian but the title of a book of translations of the Chinese poet Han that scholars were familiar with, but the Roman dialect that gave them an intimate tang which was their major charm and which the Shan, whom, incidentally, Gary Snyder also translated. illustrious names spoken of above.could not equal. 'Art', Ezra Pound said, 'does not exist in a vacuum.' And Claude Lkvi-Strauss, 'Whether one knows it or not, one never walks Coming to Norse's translation, Williams says alone along the path of creativity.' Kolatkar's list of authors, which appears to be random, is in These translations are not made into English but into the American fact a capsule biography, a life of the life of the mind. Show me idiom in which they appear in the same relationship facing English your books and 1'11 tell you who you are. It's a mind that could as the original Roman dialect does to classic Italian. move with ease from first-century BCE Italy to eighth century China to fifteenth-century France to twentieth-century America, 'Three Cups ofTed first appeared in Saleem Peeradina's antho- while at the same time picking up the language spoken in the logy Contemporary Indian Poetry in English in 1972. The antho- backstreets of Bombay, a slice of which he offers, without com- logy was the first to represent the new Indian poetry in English ment, in 'main manager ko bola'. But that said, the names of and 'Three Cups ofTea' has been a part of the canon since. I don't poets that appear in the list are not in themselves surprising. We have a date for when Kolatkar made the translation, but I suspect were all reading the same or similar things in Bombay (or Allaha- I it was made after 1965, which is after his discovery of Norse's Belli bad) in 1965. There is, however, one exception, and that is Belli. and the American demotic Norse employs to translate romanesco: Though his name belongs among the greatest in nineteenth- 'If ya wanna be funny, it's enough to be/ A gentleman.' century European literature, he is known to very few, even in So there'it is, your Indian poem. It was written in a Bombay Italy. In the mid 1960s, there was only one English translation of patois by a poet who otherwise wrote in Marathi and English. It this poet around, and it's the one Kolatkar must have read. The then became part of two literatures, Marathi and Indian English, translation is by Harold Norse and is called The Roman Sonnets but entered the latter in a translation made in the American idiom, of G.G. Belli. It has a preface by William Carlos Williams (a name one ofwhose sources, or, ifyou will, inspirations, was an American that also figures in Kolatkar's list) and an introduction by Alberto translation of a nineteenth-century Roman poet. Translating Kabir 277

them, a Brahmin widow once accompanied her father on a pilgrimage to the shrine of a famous ascetic. To reward her devotion, the ascetic prayed that she be blessed with a son. The prayer was Translating Kabir answered but there was one problem: Brahmin widows are not supposed to get pregnant and she had to abandon the infant. The wife of a weaver, who was passing that way, discovered the child and took him home. The child was Kabir. Very little is known about Kabir, outside what can be culled from Other legends presented Kabir as a diehard rebel. It is said that his poems, or from hagiographies and legends. According to the Kabir chose to spend his last days not in Benares, the holiest of latter, Kabir lived for 120 years, from 1398 to 1518. Modern holy Hindu places, a city that promises salvation to all those who scholars, however, take a more realistic view, but are divided die there and where he had lived ill his life, but in an obscure town whether he was active in the first or the second halfof the fifteenth called Maghar, a place that from ancient times has been associat- century. Kabir (whose name is a Qur'anic title of Allah meaning ed first with Buddhists, and later with Muslims and the lower 'great') was born in Benares in a Muslim family recently converted castes. 'He who dies in Maghar is reborn as an ass' Kabir says in to Islam. The family belonged to the Julaha-or weaver-caste, one poem, expressing a popular belief. The move to Maghar has and it is safe to assume that the chief reason for the conversion a clear message: the place of one's death is of no consequence; was its low status in the Hindu social system. salvation can be found anywhere. It was Kabir's last act ofdefiance. There are occasional references to the family ~rofessionin Kabir's distaste of humbug can remind you of Diogenes. He Kabir's poems. In one poem in particular, addressed to his anxious was born in a Muslim household, but poured scorn on their qazis, mother, he talks of dismantling his loom because; he says, he or lawgivers, at every opportunity. He had Hindu followers, but cannot both thread the shuttle and hold the thread of that reserved his sharpest barbs for pundits. In the end, he slipped supreme reality which he called Rama or Hari, in his hand. Some- through the fingers of both Islam and Hinduism. A famous story one who is the lord ofthree worlds, he says, is not going to let them tells how, following his death, both Hindu and Muslim mobs laid starve. Kabir was married and had a son and daughter; perhaps claim to his body. The Hindus were adamant to cremate and the two sons and two daughters. Muslims to bury him, but when they removed the shroud they Kabir's hagiographers, who have been around since c. 1600, found instead ofthe cadaver a heap offlowers.The two communities approve neither of his marriage (they would prefer him to be celi- peacefully divided the flowers and performed Kabir's last rites, bate) nor, indeed, of his lowly origin, and over the years various each according to its custom. But the legends do not end here. accounts of his life were concocted to provide him with, among When Kabir arrived in heaven, he was received by the four great other things, a better pedigree. The legends however ended up Hindu gods, Brahma, Siva, Vishnu, and Indra. Delighted to see highlighting precisely what they were meant to conceal. In one of him, they asked him to make himself at home. Indra even got up 278 Partial Recall Translating Kabir 279 from his throne and offered it to Kabir. 'Vishnu said: "My heaven weaver. Not content to worship him from a distance, he wanted is yours. Live here forever. This is my wish."' And so it was that the to taste God, that 'chemical called Ram', on his tongue. The poet- crackpot weaver of Benares who had derided Hindu religious saint could, of course, also be a woman, as Janabai, who was a practices all his life was on the road to being deified himself. maidservant, was. Bhakti is derived from the Sanskrit root bhaj, Kabir is part of the larger devotional turn known as the bhakti and one of its meanings is 'to serve, honour, revere, love, adore'. movement. Described by A.K. Ramanujan as a 'great many-sided The bhakta, the 'devotee' or 'lover of God', looks upon God with shift . . . in Hindu culture and sensibility', its distinguishing fea- a certain intimacy. It was a relationship based not on ritual but ture was an inward love for the One Deity, in disregard of, often romance, and it has its sensual, erotic side: in opposition to, religious orthodoxies and social hierarchies. The Lying beside you, degree and nature of opposition varied, but it was never wholly I'm waiting to be kissed. absent. The antagonism could at times be to one's family, if it .. But your face is turned stood in the way of the devotee's union with God. As Janabai, the And you're fast asleep. thirteenth-century poet-saint from Maharashtra, says in Arun KG 19" Kolatkar's translation, 'god my darling1 do me a favour and kill my mother-in-law'. Of all bhakti poets, of whom there were many and who wrote Bhakti began in South India, in the country of the Tamils, in in different languages (Tamil, Kannada,Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, the sixth century CE but over time acquired a pan-Indian charac- Kashmiri, Assamese, Oriya, Avadhi), Kabir is the most outspoken. ter. It moved to Karnataka in the tenth and Maharashtra in the He is ever ready to engage the reader, to harangue him, to-if it twelfth century, but it was in North India, betwdn the fifteenth came to that-wrestle him to the ground and shout in his ear: and seventeenth centuries, where it found perhaps its fullest expression. Bhakti favoured the informal over the formal, the spon- Friend, taneous over the prescribed, and the vernacular over Sanskrit. In You had one life And you blew it. a well-known verse, Kabir compared Sanskrit, the language of the gods and the preserve of Brahmins, to kupajal, the stagnant water of a well, and bhasha (vernacular, in which the bhakti poets Those who are not sang) to the running water of a stream. Devotees of Ram With bhakti, it has been said, a 'new kind of person or persona Should be in Sing Sing [came] into fashion . . . a person who flouts proprieties, refuses Or been stillborn. the education of a poet, insists that anyone can be a poet-for it is the Lord who sings through one' (A.K. Ramanujan). This new person, the poet-saint, could be a king or prime minister or *The numbers given after 'KG' refer to Parasnarh Tiwari, ed., Kabir- a low-caste cobbler, tailor, barber, cotton-carder, boatman, or granthavali, Allahabad, 196 1. 278 Partial Recall Translating Kabir 279 from his throne and offered it to Kabir. 'Vishnu said: "My heaven weaver. Not content to worship him from a distance, he wanted is yours. Live here forever. This is my wish."' And so it was that the to taste God, that 'chemical called Ram', on his tongue. The poet- crackpot weaver of Benares who had derided Hindu religious saint could, of course, also be a woman, as Janabai, who was a practices all his life was on the road to being deified himself. maidservant, was. Bhakti is derived from the Sanskrit root bhaj, Kabir is part of the larger devotional turn known as the bhakti and one of its meanings is 'to serve, honour, revere, love, adore'. movement. Described by A.K. Ramanujan as a 'great many-sided The bhakta, the 'devotee' or 'lover of God', looks upon God with shift . . . in Hindu culture and sensibility', its distinguishing fea- a certain intimacy. It was a relationship based not on ritual but ture was an inward love for the One Deity, in disregard of, often romance, and it has its sensual, erotic side: in opposition to, religious orthodoxies and social hierarchies. The Lying beside you, degree and nature of opposition varied, but it was never wholly I'm waiting to be kissed. absent. The antagonism could at times be to one's family, if it .. But your face is turned stood in the way of the devotee's union with God. As Janabai, the And you're fast asleep. thirteenth-century poet-saint from Maharashtra, says in Arun KG 19" Kolatkar's translation, 'god my darling1 do me a favour and kill my mother-in-law'. Of all bhakti poets, of whom there were many and who wrote Bhakti began in South India, in the country of the Tamils, in in different languages (Tamil, Kannada,Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, the sixth century CE but over time acquired a pan-Indian charac- Kashmiri, Assamese, Oriya, Avadhi), Kabir is the most outspoken. ter. It moved to Karnataka in the tenth and Maharashtra in the He is ever ready to engage the reader, to harangue him, to-if it twelfth century, but it was in North India, betwdn the fifteenth came to that-wrestle him to the ground and shout in his ear: and seventeenth centuries, where it found perhaps its fullest expression. Bhakti favoured the informal over the formal, the spon- Friend, taneous over the prescribed, and the vernacular over Sanskrit. In You had one life And you blew it. a well-known verse, Kabir compared Sanskrit, the language of the gods and the preserve of Brahmins, to kupajal, the stagnant water of a well, and bhasha (vernacular, in which the bhakti poets Those who are not sang) to the running water of a stream. Devotees of Ram With bhakti, it has been said, a 'new kind of person or persona Should be in Sing Sing [came] into fashion . . . a person who flouts proprieties, refuses Or been stillborn. the education of a poet, insists that anyone can be a poet-for it is the Lord who sings through one' (A.K. Ramanujan). This new person, the poet-saint, could be a king or prime minister or *The numbers given after 'KG' refer to Parasnarh Tiwari, ed., Kabir- a low-caste cobbler, tailor, barber, cotton-carder, boatman, or granthavali, Allahabad, 196 1. 280 Partial Recall Translating Kabir 28 1 Try though you may, there are variations between them. Somepadas, like KG 62 ('Easy, Neither punditry, friend./ What's the fuss about?'), are found in all three tradi- Nor penance, Nor telling beads tions-the Bijak, the Rajasthani, and the Adi Grantb. Its Bijak Will bring you and Adi Grantb versions, however, have only one line in com- To the four-armed god. mon. This is not unusual, but it makes Kabir's textual history a minefield, 'one of the most complex to be associated with a single author in world literature' (Vinay Dharwadker). A Kabir poem has no time to waste; it hits the ground running. Two distinct translation practices have emerged from that And yet, despite the thousands of poems ascribed to Kabir, minefield. The first is that of scholars, pioneered by Charlotte not one can be attributed to him with certainty. His is a collective Vaudeville, whose Kabir was published by Clarendon Press, voice so individual that it cannot be mistaken for anyone else's. Oxford, in 1974, followed by Linda Hess, Nirmal Dass, and Vinay Dharwadker. Their translations closely follow the printed text. 'In each rendering', Dhanvadker writes in a translator's note to Kabir: The Weaver; Songs, 'one verse paragraph in English re- If the historical Kabir is elusive, the authentic Kabir text is even presents one verse in the original.' more so. Since no manuscript of Kabir's poems that goes back to The other, older practice of translation is one that, ifnot always his lifetime has ever been found, the Kabir corpus, necessarily, wittingly, responds to and illuminates the performative impro- is not about a single text but families of texts, of which there visatory tradition out ofwhich the songs arose and by which they are three: the Bijak or 'eastern' tradition, the Rajasthani or 'west- have been transmitted. These are the translations best known to ern' tradition, and the Punjabi tradition centred around the Adi the general reading public, the Kabir of Ezra Pound, Tagore, Granth, the sacred book of the Sikhs. With the exception of the and Robert Bly. Pound's Kabir, ten poems that first appeared in Bijak, which is considerably smaller, all the other texts asso- Ramananda Chatterjee's The Modern Review in 19 13, comes out ciated with these traditions are Norton-sized (and Norton-like) of literal versions provided by Kali Mohan Ghose, and Bly's anthologies, drawing on the work of more than one poet. comes out of Tagore's widely-read One Hundred Poems of Kabir, The Pancvani, or 'Songs of the Five', is an early collection from which was first published in 1914 and has been in print since. the 'western' tradition. The earliest Pancvani recension we know The story I will now tell helps to illuminate the complicated of is from 1614. It has over 1000 songs-by Dadu (1 544-1603), and suggestive ways by which Kabir's songs have been commu- Kabir, Namdev (c. 1270-1350), Raidas (c. 1450-1 520), and Hardas nicated even in relatively recent times. In Allahabad where I live, (joruit c.l600?)-clustered around different ragas. The Kabir there are two tall crumbling gateposts opposite the university's padas in the recensions vary in number from 348 to 393. The same senate house, their red bricks showing and several of them mis- ones do not recur in all the recensions, and even when they do sing, with a rusty semi-circular sign on which BELVEDERE 280 Partial Recall Translating Kabir 28 1 Try though you may, there are variations between them. Somepadas, like KG 62 ('Easy, Neither punditry, friend./ What's the fuss about?'), are found in all three tradi- Nor penance, Nor telling beads tions-the Bijak, the Rajasthani, and the Adi Grantb. Its Bijak Will bring you and Adi Grantb versions, however, have only one line in com- To the four-armed god. mon. This is not unusual, but it makes Kabir's textual history a minefield, 'one of the most complex to be associated with a single author in world literature' (Vinay Dharwadker). A Kabir poem has no time to waste; it hits the ground running. Two distinct translation practices have emerged from that And yet, despite the thousands of poems ascribed to Kabir, minefield. The first is that of scholars, pioneered by Charlotte not one can be attributed to him with certainty. His is a collective Vaudeville, whose Kabir was published by Clarendon Press, voice so individual that it cannot be mistaken for anyone else's. Oxford, in 1974, followed by Linda Hess, Nirmal Dass, and Vinay Dharwadker. Their translations closely follow the printed text. 'In each rendering', Dhanvadker writes in a translator's note to Kabir: The Weaver; Songs, 'one verse paragraph in English re- If the historical Kabir is elusive, the authentic Kabir text is even presents one verse in the original.' more so. Since no manuscript of Kabir's poems that goes back to The other, older practice of translation is one that, ifnot always his lifetime has ever been found, the Kabir corpus, necessarily, wittingly, responds to and illuminates the performative impro- is not about a single text but families of texts, of which there visatory tradition out ofwhich the songs arose and by which they are three: the Bijak or 'eastern' tradition, the Rajasthani or 'west- have been transmitted. These are the translations best known to ern' tradition, and the Punjabi tradition centred around the Adi the general reading public, the Kabir of Ezra Pound, Tagore, Granth, the sacred book of the Sikhs. With the exception of the and Robert Bly. Pound's Kabir, ten poems that first appeared in Bijak, which is considerably smaller, all the other texts asso- Ramananda Chatterjee's The Modern Review in 19 13, comes out ciated with these traditions are Norton-sized (and Norton-like) of literal versions provided by Kali Mohan Ghose, and Bly's anthologies, drawing on the work of more than one poet. comes out of Tagore's widely-read One Hundred Poems of Kabir, The Pancvani, or 'Songs of the Five', is an early collection from which was first published in 1914 and has been in print since. the 'western' tradition. The earliest Pancvani recension we know The story I will now tell helps to illuminate the complicated of is from 1614. It has over 1000 songs-by Dadu (1 544-1603), and suggestive ways by which Kabir's songs have been commu- Kabir, Namdev (c. 1270-1350), Raidas (c. 1450-1 520), and Hardas nicated even in relatively recent times. In Allahabad where I live, (joruit c.l600?)-clustered around different ragas. The Kabir there are two tall crumbling gateposts opposite the university's padas in the recensions vary in number from 348 to 393. The same senate house, their red bricks showing and several of them mis- ones do not recur in all the recensions, and even when they do sing, with a rusty semi-circular sign on which BELVEDERE 282 Partial Recall Translating Kabir 283

PRINTING WORKS is written in barely visible letters. An un- of North Indian poet-saints, and an initial selection of Kabir in paved lane leads from the road to a colonial bungalow at the back. 1907 was followed by eight more. Clearly they found a ready One part of it houses the printing works; in the other the current market, and though it's a hundred years now since they first ap- owners live. In the 1880s, Belvedere House stood in what was then eared they remain in print. a much more extensive compound. Kipling lived in Belvedere Tagore's translations were based on Kshiti Mohan Sen's four- House in 1888, when the house belonged to Edmonia Hill and part compilation of 19 10- 1 1. There are, in the Sen compilation, her husband Samuel Alexander Hill, professor of science at Muir 341 Kabir poems in all. Apart from providing the Hindi ori- Central College, and some ofhis most famous stories, such as 'Baa ginal, Sen gives each poem also in the Bengali script, followed by Baa, Black Sheep', were written there. In 'Rikki-Tikki-Tavi' he a paraphrase in Bengali. Sen had collected the poems on his own, describes its 'large garden, only half cultivated, with bushes as but he was also familiar with the printed editions, including big as summer-houses of Marshal Niel roses, lime and orange Prasad's. Almost all the poems in Tagore's One Hundred Poems trees, clumps of bamboos, and thickets of high grass.' Kipling of Kabir are also found in one form or another in two of the incidentally was also familiar with Kabir, whom he associated Belvedere Press Kabir volumes. In his preface, Sen says that he with religious tolerance, and composed a song in his name for compared the poems he came across in Prasad and in other printed the Second]ungle Book : sources with the oral versions and the handwritten notes of singers on which he had been working for many years, first in Benares and -. Now the white road to Delhi is mat for his feet, later at different places in North India. 'From my different read- The sal and the kikar must guard him from heat; ings,' he writes His home is the camp, and the waste, and the crowd- He is seeing the Way as bairagi avowed! I chose those that accorded most with what were being sung by the He has looked upon Man, and his eyeballs are clear practitioners and which they and I judged to be true to the tradition. (There was 0'ne; there is One, and but One, saith Kabir); I need hardly add that from the variety of advices I got, I had to The Red Mist of Doing has thinned to a cloud- choose. The sadhaks [adepts] often articulate things that fit their own He has taken the Path for bairagi avowed! times. And the same poems have different versions, and sometimes there are versions that could be understood easily only at the times Around 1903 the Belvedere Press was set up on the grounds of when they were first composed. I had to take note of all these concerns Belvedere House by Baleshwar Prasad. Prasad is an obscure figure. in making my edited collection of Kabir's poems. [Translation by His descendants still run the Belvedere Printing Works, but not Amartya Sen] even they know when he was born or when he died, though he appears to have been active some time between 1876 and 19 16. Prasad, for his part, provides few details of the sources of his He was a teacher in Benares, a Hindi journalist, and he translated Kabir. Various Kabir Panthi mahants, or the superiors of monas- Shakespeare's plays into Urdu, before moving to Allahabad and teries of the sect devoted to Kabir, sent him old manuscripts from becoming a publisher. Prasad brought out a series of collections cities in the Punjab. He may have also consulted a few undated 284 Partial Recall Translating Kabir 285 modern manuscripts in Benares. Another of his sources was the more authoritative editions, beginning with Parasnath Tiwari's oral tradition, sung variants of verses in the Bijak. landmark Kabir-granthavali of 1961, on which I have based my Both editors in any case, true to the devotional and improvisat- own translations, there is a sense in which there can be no authori- ory origins of the songs, make choices, as Sen rightly says that had tative edition of the work of this supremely anti-authoritarian no choice but to, and these inevitably reflect their own interest in master, who is present in the many manifestations of his work and understanding of the tradition. As a member of the Radha- through a kind of infinite regress. soami sect, which believes in the supremacy of a living guru, he replaced the words used for addressing God-Kabir's Rama and Hari-with guru and gurudev. Sen's edition lacks theguru words, instead including ones for love. Sometimes it is impossible to As with the Kabir text, so with this Kabir translation; it is made tell whether a change-the same stanzas, for example, will appear keeping the text's inclusive geniws in mind. Though not from the in both editions but in different orders-reflects different sources Pancvani, mohi tohi lagi kaise chutte is from the 'western' tradi- or the editor's individual preference, in Sen's case the primacy he tion. Given below are its opening lines in three translations: accorded the oral tradition, the songs 'sung by the practitioners'. Be that as it may, it was the Sen edition that Tagore drew on and How could the love between Thee and me sever? As the leaf of the lotus abides on the water: so thou art my Lord, that later became the source of several European- and Asian- and I am Thy servant. language translations of Kabir, one of them made by Czeslaw As the night-bird Chakor gazes all night at the moon: so Thou art Milosz into Polish and subsequently translated back into English my Lord and I am Thy servant. by Milosz and Robert Hass. The English mystic Evelyn Underhill introducedTagore's translation, which she is credited with having (Tagore) helped to prepare, with the assurance that Sen Why should we two ever want to part? has gathered from many sources-sometimes from books and manuscripts, sometimes from the lips of wandering ascetics and Just as the leaf of the water rhubarb lives floating on the water, minstrels-a large collection of poems and hymns to which Kabir's we live as the great one and the little one. name is attached, and carefully sifted the authentic songs from the As the owl opens his eyes all night to the moon, many spurious works now attributed to him. These painstaking we live as the great one and the little one. labours alone have made the present undertaking possible.

Separating the authentic from the spufious in Kabir is a hopelessly tangled affair and Underhill may have somewhat missed the Separate us? point. While it is obviouslyimportant now to have the substantially Pierce a diamond first. Partial Recall Translating Kabir 287 < We're lotus In certain pockets that tradition is still alive, continuing to And water, add padas, some of them incorporating 'modern' material, to the Servant open-ended Kabir corpus. A Kabir song recorded by Bahadur And master. I Singh in Rajasthan in the mid 1990s, compares the body to an My love for you Is no secret. anjan (engine), the soul to a passenger, who, his taim (time) on earth being short, is advised not to lose his tikat (ticket). One lain I'm the grub (line) will take the passenger to Immortal City; the other to the To your ichneumon fly. . . . City of Death. When asked how Kabir could have been familiar (KG 18; my translation) with the railways, to say nothing of English words like 'engine', 'time', 'ticket', and 'line', the singer, Bhikaramji Sharma, looked The difference betweenTagore's' translation and mine is explained 'most hurt' and replied that Kabir, being a seer, knew everything. by our source texts. There is no grub and ichneumon fly in Kshiti ( Seen in this way, the Songs of Kabir is both a work of transla- Mohan Sen, and no moonbeam-eating chakor bird in Parasnath tion based on the best available critical editions and, like Bhika- ~iwari.'~hesame idea is being expressed in both poems, but they ramji's song, a further elaboration of the Kabir corpus, taking don't use the same metaphor to express it in. its place alongside those that have already been in existence for Bly's translation and Tagore's differ in precisely the way that hundreds of years. Here, too, in these poems, Kabir knows every- Sen's and Tiwari's originals do. When he changes chakor to owl thing, including, in one paah, as we have seen above, the name and lotus to water rhubarb, Bly is approachingTagore as an ano- of a New York State correctional facility. Meanwhile, in the nymous medieval singer would apprbach apada. For the singer, manuscript section of Indian libraries, over endless cups of milky the pada was not something whose words had unalterably been I tea, the core group of padas sung by the historical figure that fixed, to be slavishly followed while singing, but something that goes by Kabir's name continues, as it ought, to exercise scholars. was provisional and fluid, a working draft, whose lines and ima- i ges could be shifted around, or substituted by others, or deleted entirely. As with the blues, another example of 'collective creation', the lines could be 'altered, extended, abridged, and transposed' (Luc Sante). During this process, as it passed from performer to performer, travelling from eastern Uttar Pradesh to western Rajas- than or circulating within the same region, hepada acquired new features, at the same time remaining faithful to what the historian D.D. Kosambi termed a 'pronounced literary physiognomy' (recognizable even in Kipling's suigeneris 'Song'), which we have come to know as Kabir's. Partial Recall Translating Kabir 287 < We're lotus In certain pockets that tradition is still alive, continuing to And water, add padas, some of them incorporating 'modern' material, to the Servant open-ended Kabir corpus. A Kabir song recorded by Bahadur And master. I Singh in Rajasthan in the mid 1990s, compares the body to an My love for you Is no secret. anjan (engine), the soul to a passenger, who, his taim (time) on earth being short, is advised not to lose his tikat (ticket). One lain I'm the grub (line) will take the passenger to Immortal City; the other to the To your ichneumon fly. . . . City of Death. When asked how Kabir could have been familiar (KG 18; my translation) with the railways, to say nothing of English words like 'engine', 'time', 'ticket', and 'line', the singer, Bhikaramji Sharma, looked The difference betweenTagore's' translation and mine is explained 'most hurt' and replied that Kabir, being a seer, knew everything. by our source texts. There is no grub and ichneumon fly in Kshiti ( Seen in this way, the Songs of Kabir is both a work of transla- Mohan Sen, and no moonbeam-eating chakor bird in Parasnath tion based on the best available critical editions and, like Bhika- ~iwari.'~hesame idea is being expressed in both poems, but they ramji's song, a further elaboration of the Kabir corpus, taking don't use the same metaphor to express it in. its place alongside those that have already been in existence for Bly's translation and Tagore's differ in precisely the way that hundreds of years. Here, too, in these poems, Kabir knows every- Sen's and Tiwari's originals do. When he changes chakor to owl thing, including, in one paah, as we have seen above, the name and lotus to water rhubarb, Bly is approachingTagore as an ano- of a New York State correctional facility. Meanwhile, in the nymous medieval singer would apprbach apada. For the singer, manuscript section of Indian libraries, over endless cups of milky the pada was not something whose words had unalterably been I tea, the core group of padas sung by the historical figure that fixed, to be slavishly followed while singing, but something that goes by Kabir's name continues, as it ought, to exercise scholars. was provisional and fluid, a working draft, whose lines and ima- i ges could be shifted around, or substituted by others, or deleted entirely. As with the blues, another example of 'collective creation', the lines could be 'altered, extended, abridged, and transposed' (Luc Sante). During this process, as it passed from performer to performer, travelling from eastern Uttar Pradesh to western Rajas- than or circulating within the same region, hepada acquired new features, at the same time remaining faithful to what the historian D.D. Kosambi termed a 'pronounced literary physiognomy' (recognizable even in Kipling's suigeneris 'Song'), which we have come to know as Kabir's. Bibliographical Note 289

stark contrast. 'The Emperor Has No Clothes', which appeared in Ch~zndrabhii~i# 3 (1980) and 8 7 (1982), was written in a long fit of rage. The cause of the ragr is explained in the essay. It appears Bibliogaphical Note here in slightly revised form. 'What is an lndian Poem?' was read at a seminar on approaches to literary history. The seminar, perhaps because it was organized by an Italian scholar of Hindi, Francesca Orsini, and held at the Italian Cultural Centre in New Delhi, led me to presume, mistakenly of course, that all contri- The eleven essays in this collection were written over a period of butiorls were required to have an Italian connection. I had seen a thirty years. 'The Bradman Class' was part of a series that Debo- mention of the Roman poet G.G. Belli in Arun Kolatkarb papers, nair magazine ran in 1980. 'Descendants', 'Death of a Poet', which became the basis of the essay. It was first published in 'Towards a History ofIndian Literature in English', and 'Translating Fulcrum #4 (2005). Kabir' were introductions to The Last Bungalow: Writings on 'Street Music: A BriefHistory', published here for the first time, Allahabad (2007), Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar was delivered as thr third Ravi Dayal nlemorial lecture at University (2010), An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English College, Oxford, on 24 February 2010. 1 am gateful to Martin (2003), and Songs of Kabir (201 I), respectively. These are books Pick for asking me to deliver the lecture and to Saikat Nandi for I edited (and in one case, Songs ofKabir, translated). making the arrangements. Apart from Arun Kolatkar, the only other Indian poet on whom I have written something of essay length is A.K. Ramanujan; 'Looking for A. K. Ramanujan' appeared in An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. 'Mela' was commissioned by Penguin India for Indian Exsentiah (20 1O), where it appeared as 'City of Clay'. 'Partial Recalr~isan essay that I didn't set out to write, at least initially. Sent V. S. Naipaul's 1ndia:AMillion MutiniesNow (1991) by The Ge~sburgReviewfor review, I thought I should re-read his two previous India books as well as familiarize myself with his other travelogues before writing it. By the time I did so a year had passed and the editor had lost interest. Out of remorse, I wrote 'Partial Recall'. It appeared in the Spring 1994 issue of the magazine and simultaneously in the inaugural issue of CivilLines. In Bibliographical Note 289