Issue 13 Saba Hasan, ‘The Book of Disquiet’, mixed media, 17″ x 13″, 2005 About Us Culture matters. And it has to matter in India, with its diverse languages, dialects, regions and communities; its rich range of voices from the mainstream and the peripheries. This was the starting point for Guftugu (www.guftugu.in), a quarterly e-journal of poetry, prose, conversations, images and videos which the Indian Writers’ Forum runs as one of its programmes. The aim of the journal is to publish, with universal access online, the best works by Indian cultural practitioners in a place where they need not fear intimidation or irrational censorship, or be excluded by the profit demands of the marketplace. Such an inclusive platform sparks lively dialogue on literary and artistic issues that demand discussion and debate. The guiding spirit of the journal is that culture must have many narratives from many different voices – from the established to the marginal, from the conventional to the deeply experimental. To sum up our vision: Whatever our language, genre or medium, we will freely use our imagination to produce what we see as meaningful for our times. We insist on our freedom to speak and debate without hindrance, both to each other and to our readers and audience. Together, but in different voices, we will interpret and reinterpret the past, our common legacy of contesting narratives; and debate on the present through our creative work. Past issues of Guftugu can be downloaded as PDFs. Downloads of issues are for private reading only. All material in Guftugu is copyrighted. See Copyright. Guftugu acknowledges the generous support of a friend of Guftugu, as well as the Tata Trusts for a matching grant towards its production in 2018. Our Team Consulting Editors K. Satchidanandan Githa Hariharan Editorial Collective Daniya Rahman Ishita Mehta Kanika Katyal Site Shweta Jain Design, Art and Layout Shoili Kanungo Advisory Panel Adil Jussawalla Anand Gulammohammed Sheikh Jerry Pinto M. Mukundan N.S. Madhavan Orijit Sen Shubha Mudgal Contributions: Guftugu welcomes contributions from writers, academics, artists, cartoonists, film makers, performing artists and scientists. Please email us at [email protected] or [email protected] with your ideas and/ or work, and we will get back to you. Contents: From the Editors Can we revive our democracy? 1 Reason and Rationality Some Leaves from India’s Intellectual History By Krishna Mohan Shrimali 3 Now By Adil Jussawalla 19 Listening to the Woman’s Voice Githa Hariharan in conversation with Shashi Deshpande 20 Fifty Years Later Poems by J. V. Pawar Translated from Marathi by V. D. Chandanshive 30 Skin A story by Abhinav Kumar 38 Hope in Our Times By Keki N. Daruwalla 43 Fear By Dalpat Chauhan Translated from Gujarati by Hemang Desai 45 Divergent Trajectories of ‘Masjid-e Qurt̤uba’ Iqbal’s Imaginings and the Historical Life of the Monument By Riyaz Latif 57 In Conversation with Mridangam Player Lakshmi Pillai The percussionist talks about her musical journey 66 Centenary By Kalpish Ratna 67 Etudes Poems by Medha Singh 82 Bridges Salil Chaturvedi and Rajeshree Thakker 86 Contributors 90 Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy and Copyright 93 From the Editors Can we revive our democracy? S. Vijayaraghavan, ‘Politics Against Politics’, water colour on paper, 29.7 cms x 21 cms, 2007 One of Aesop’s fables goes like this. Once there was a quarrel between a horse and a deer. The horse approached a hunter to help him defeat the deer. The hunter was happy to help, but on one condition: that the horse should allow him to bridle and ride it. The horse readily agreed and the hunter kept his word and killed the deer. The horse now asked the hunter to free him from the bit and the reins. But the hunter said, ‘They looked good on you,’ and he let the bit and reins remain. It is with this tale that Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt begin their recent book on the rise of Donald Trump, How Democracies Die. All the authoritarian rulers – from Mussolini, Hitler and Franco to Viktor Orban, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Donald Trump came to power like this. They ask the people to vote them to power, promising development, a slogan that has always charmed the middle classes who fear socialism. Once elected, they gradually exert more and more control over people’s freedom. In the process, they subvert constitutional safeguards and fundamental freedoms. The tale of Narendra Modi’s rise is no different. He too pretended he was a humble servant of the nation. He touched the steps of the Parliament reverently on the day he assumed 1 power. He made several promises to all classes of people through his monthly speeches full of empty sound and vain fury. But he was silent when liberal or radical intellectuals, writers and journalists were murdered in broad daylight. He kept quiet when common people – Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis in particular – were attacked and even lynched. He quietly removed environmental safeguards to help the corporates who had brought him to power. He allowed his henchmen to divide society on the basis of caste, religion, birth, and ethnicity. He used the idea of an exclusive and insular nationalism to threaten and shame anyone who dared discuss disturbing but significant issues such as Kashmir. He made a ritual of patriotism by making the national anthem compulsory in cinema halls even if many of them screen films that ruin people’s sensibility and legalise every form of violence. He tested the people’s endurance through demonetisation and the badly implemented GST regime. He ‘othered’ and demonised the minorities, religious, racial or sexual. He ridiculed the opposition instead of answering their rightful criticism He built a gigantic self-image with the collaboration of the big corporate media, treated intellectuals, and writers like dirt, took over every free institution in the nation, mostly founded by Jawaharlal Nehru, and turned them into the ideological tools of his Hindutva brigade. He replaced dialogue with suppression, cyber-trolling, and murder. The India of our dreams is sure to vanish if we allow this venomous concoction of crony capitalism and majoritarian communalism to reassume power in 1919. It is time now for all of us to assess the dark legacy of the last four years. It is time to restore an India that is infinitely creative in its cultural, linguistic, racial and religious diversity. K. Satchidanandan Githa Hariharan December 2018 Text © K. Satchidanandan and Githa Hariharan; image © S. Vijayaraghavan. 2 Reason and Rationality Some Leaves from India’s Intellectual History Krishna Mohan Shrimali Saba Hasan, photograph from her haqeeqat series, 2018 In historical terms, how should we characterise the expression of reasoned political dissent in India’s democracy? Within what tradition do we seek the antecedents of a Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M.M. Kalburgi, or Gauri Lankesh? And what is their cultural location vis-à-vis our contemporary state and society? The standard account of modern intellectual dissent identifies it as the outcome of a particular history, one distinctively European in its origin and inspiration. The triumph of ratio (reason) over fides (faith) is held to be a characteristic feature of its early modern 3 aspect, a feature that solidifies in the field of politics with the onset of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Political dissent then appears to be the product of a rationality embedded as the defining principle of the modern Western nation-state – with its separation of powers, ideology of political progressivism, the public sphere, and other concomitant features of European modernity. However, that last entry on the list should give us pause. Evidence is not in short supply, of modern European claims to rationality travelling hand-in-hand with intolerance, genocidal violence, and state repression. A recent critical observation holds that ‘reason and rationality have always played a central role in promoting prejudices against colour, caste, religion, sexuality, gender and other cultures’ and that ‘in this increasingly angry age … there are always good reasons to be a racist, colourist, communalist, casteist or misogynist. A decision not to give in to these prejudices is not a judgement of reason and rationality alone; it is also an ethical judgement which depends on how we allocate value to anything’ (emphasis added).1If truth is relative; if notions of ethics/morality and right/wrong are relative – subject to spatial and temporal contexts; would rationality/reason be relative, too? There is also the question of a tension between ‘rationality’ and ‘wisdom’.2 A purely secular outlook is not ipso facto proof against tendencies towards bigotry, coercion, and misrepresentation – as evident, for instance, in the notion that the irrational thrives within the bounds of religion alone. Therefore, our understanding of rationality/reason must transcend the features of the modern nation- state. Even at the risk of being too simplistic, rationality may be broadly seen as ‘the discipline of subjecting one’s choices – of actions as well as of objectives, values, and priorities – to reasoned scrutiny’.3 Developing a rational temper is learning to reason about what makes life worthwhile, what we should really care about. A sort of dialectical relationship may be postulated between ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’. While the former pertains to culture, the latter has more to do with practice. That is to say, rationality is a cultural characteristic,