…
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
..
.
Category Archives: Articles/ Miscellaneous
Scholarly Articles and Miscellaneous pieces
11 Years of Blogging
Today wordpress congratulated me on our 11th anniversary. Our journey together had begun in 2011. It’s been a long way and I have not been regular but blogging has always given me pleasure. Sometimes, I suspect, it’s given pleasure to my followers and visitors too.
Here’s a wonderful page on what I think can inspire the future of our own Mother Ganga too.
Ariel’s Lament (To Professor Charu sheel Singh)
Photo Courtesy: Professor Binod Mishra
You taught me language and we had not talked for a year, and more, won’t now, ever.
Traces, faint, of your twinkling eyes and wide grin, will never die, until I do. Lesser men
grabbed higher thrones as we looked on, I in dismay and you with a smile. I demanded,
wanted; expected more for you, thus more for myself, if the law of proportionality between
intellect and rise held. I discovered that there are more exceptions than proofs of the law.
You have left and I grieve impersonally for a personal tone you’d not approve of, I know.
My song had to be objective, diamond-hard. I’d have detailed those infinite flights,
spanned by those distant bells, but then, you wanted the singer hidden, singing “darkling”
pure strains. “Only the song matters”. I rebelled and wrote “The air I breathe in”.
You didn’t mince words in your short review. “Too subjective and mushy”. I never showed
you my poems after that. You’ll never get to see this one.
Our faiths were similar sometimes, only sometimes. Yet I needed my
“points of departure” and for them, I needed you.
“Create a system or be forever a slave”, you said.
The Satan-poet lived smiling and left with head un-bent.
Did you know what you were doing back then? The old “grammarian”
did not fully know what his disciples did. It takes an eagle’s soaring heights
to take in a glance the stretched land of gold. You liked standing aloof, for you
never belonged to the likes of them and Coriolanus would never let the sheep forget that.
Published in GloMag May 2021.
In Memoriam; Professor Charu Sheel Singh
Saying that I’ll miss him is inadequate. Of course I’ll miss him but there’s more. I know that we are born to die. I was born to die. He was born to die. You are born to die… I totally know that, and I’ve been watching TV a lot nowadays, news, you see. So, one would expect me to be prepared for death. Surprise! I was in no way prepared for this one death, not prepared in two ways. I was not ready for it, and I could not allow that to happen in a world controlled by my mind, if there ever was any such world. Well, there’s no such world. He passed away late at night and I got the news the following afternoon. It took me time to register the full significance of the news. My first response was to make a couple of calls to confirm the news, although I had received it from a very reliable source. I finally accepted it, and let the day pass. Nearly a week has passed since then.
Professor Charu Sheel Singh is one between the two teachers who shaped my life in two different ways. His method was to make one aware of the range of responses hidden deep within oneself, if there was actually something hidden within the person. He did not teach the syllabus. He taught the students. He made them better, if they worked with his plan. He made them stronger, even if they rebelled against his stream of ideas and ideology (and he had a strong stream of ideas and a definite and defined ideology). In fact, he fully expected his best students to rebel. He quoted Blake with twinkling eyes: “…Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s” (The Words of Los). His talks went from literature to philosophy in a blink, and then stayed there for some time. It was digression alright, but it served his plan well. Now I’m not even sure whether it was his plan, or I had assumed it.
I am glad that sometime last year, probably in February; I had called him only to tell him of my debt to him. He was not comfortable hearing my praise. He had never been comfortable hearing his praise. He’d say something like this back in olden days, “In order to praise me, you need to comprehend me. And I am not sure that there are many in the class who can do that. I’ve been praised enough by those whose judgement I value. I know what I am”. So, that was that. He did not take nonsense, neither did he give any. His talk was always pithy and precise. He said what he meant and stopped when he had done that. He always expected the best from us. I remember having called him, informing him of something I saw as my major achievement. His reply: “It was expected of you”. That was all. I have no one now, to call them and expect the same sincere and fulfilling, short reply. Life, my life, lost something deep in his death.
I’m an honourable man
For all practical purposes I am an honourable man.
No, really, I am, and it’s a plain statement.
Not that I can prove it on paper, but it’s true.
Not that there is an objective test like the one for IQ.
There is no case against me in any court of law (yet),
So, I assert that I am an honourable man.
So what if I stalk my facebook friends’ walls sometimes
To see whether I find a mention in their posts.
So what if I go to read their blog posts sometimes and
search
For a line, even a phrase in a poem, or a sentence in prose
pieces
That mentions me, even if in irony.
Does it make me any less honourable? Does it?
Even if it did, I’d still go looking there,
And I’d still find nothing there.
Do my friends come and check my pages and posts?
Even if they did, they’d find nothing about them there.
I write only about myself, not about them.
For I am an honourable man.
Published in GloMag December 2020
Death
What does one have to lose on and to death?
What does one gain from and in life?
These two questions are actually one.
One loses to and on death
what one gained in and from life.
Isn’t that true? Life lives in a body
that’s made of flesh, bones and blood.
With life it’s lost to death.
No one carried their body with them after death. Material possessions are left behind too. Although they were buried with the pharaohs in their tombs, yet I suspect that even the priests who performed the rituals knew that those items did not go beyond the pyramids. Name and fame are gained in life and barring a miniscule minority, they don’t outlive the person who owns them. What good do name and fame that outlive the person can do for those exceptional few once they are dead? All that one is born with, into and later earns, is immaterial. That leaves us with the only solace to many, the only thing that matters: how one lived and died. That has some relation with things like code of conduct and ethics.
Religious, and later, secular literature up to the mid-twentieth century is structured around that core of codes. When liberal humanism looked at literature as something universal, full of light and sweetness, something worthy of being saved, it was actually fixing its gaze at codes. Literature and what it contained in its essence, was man’s defiant stand against death. The Second World War took even that solace of a code away from homo sapiens. Since then, nothing has mattered and nothing has amounted to anything.
When life is meaningless and just an accident, what’s the point in prolonging the pain that existence is? Or, in Uncle Will’s words from Hamlet’s soliloquy: Why “grunt and sweat under a weary life”, when there’s an easy way out? When asked about that easy way, he adds:
… To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.
There’s actually no logical point in prolonging all that grunting and sweating even for a moment from the moment one realizes the ultimate truth of life. I don’t know with certainty whether any statistical analysis of sufficiently large samples cutting across continents, races, genders, classes and castes has been done to ascertain the reason people give for prolonging their lives, or not. I suspect, looking at the complexity and the probably impossible sample size of any such study, that no such study has been done till date. There are 7.8 billion people who are alive today on this our planet, in 2016, the year for which WHO provides data, the number was 7.4 billion. The total number of deaths worldwide that year was roughly 57 million <https://www.who.int/gho/world-health-statistics>. WHO reports the number of successful suicides out of all deaths all over the world at 1.4% in the same year <https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/>. What does it prove? It proves that people don’t like the idea of killing themselves.
They may talk about death in general, or other people’s death. They like to live and they dislike talking or thinking about their own death or even their own life. In fact, they are addicted to the sure rhythm of everyday life so much that their death is a taboo topic and word for them. To stay alive is a norm and has always been a norm in all the civilizations cutting through the boundaries of space-time. If you, my reader, want to prove otherwise, give me evidence, data, source enough to convince me. What’s behind that universal human preference for staying alive over being dead? An individual’s demand for euthanasia is a very special exception and will not be discussed in detail here.
I like to think that there’s less conscious thinking and more evolutionary animal and human programming involved here. No, I will not invoke either Freud or Darwin here. Although, I can’t deny their presence in my mind as I type. I like to think that through very long the process of natural selection and evolution those animals/humans were successful in passing on their genes to the next generation that lived more. To rephrase it, those animals/ humans that have a tendency to kill themselves have lesser chances of passing on their genes to the next generation, and from there, to the next generation and so on. Therefore, in the long run, nature culls out the genetic coding with suicidal tendencies. Or, to make it more scientific: In the long run the number of those with suicidal genes is reduced generation after generation (unproved and un-googled theorization here).
I googled to prove one part of my theory right. Yes, there’s a definite link between suicide and heredity or genes. “A new study has found evidence that a specific gene is linked to suicidal behaviour” < https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111007113941.htm >. Add to that the significant information that: “90 percent of people who die by suicide have a psychiatric illness at the time of death. Mood disorders, psychotic disorders, certain personality disorders and substance use disorders can increase suicide risk substantially. Each of those disorders has a genetic component, too”<https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-q-and-a-suicide-and-genetics-a-complicated-association/ >. Therefore, “ 43% of the variability in suicidal behaviour may be explained by genetics, while the remaining 57% may be explained by environmental factors” < https://www.nature.com/articles/4001803 >. Yet, as 43% of 1.4% of all deaths is not a very sizeable proportion, it’s very difficult to link it significantly to any evolutionary or natural selection process.
What makes staying alive more popular than choosing death over it? There may be two shifting primary reasons behind it. In childhood a human animal’s instinct for self-preservation, and later, the fear of death itself. A child does not think about the abstract idea of death, self-preservation keeps him instinctively alive. Society instills the fear of, or at least repulsion from the very idea of death and self-destruction. For the collective level of human existence individual life is more valuable than death, barring few exceptions when a person is given the license to kill, and to become a martyr i.e. the power to give or take lives is not given without immense responsibility, at least theoretically. That’s why encounter killings are seen as crime both in its legal and moral sense. As individuals perform important societal functions, they ought to live and serve for as long as they can do it, or at least till they cross sixty something. If they die before that, it’s a definite material loss for the society. After they are past their prime, their death is not so much tragic. Moreover, old people are expected to age and die. The idea is not worded as such but gerontophobia and various biases against the elderly point towards it.
Even while alive, all humans are not equal. The romantics always insist that they should be, but they neither were, at any time or place, nor are equal. When an important person dies, or commits suicide, people and media talk about it for at least forty-eight hours. Their names are flashed everywhere as condolences pour in. If the person had been politically very important, there even may be the declaration of national grief. Contrast that with the death of the unimportant persons (common man). Their name, even if it finds mention somewhere on page nine, is forgotten the moment it’s read. Their death does not merit condolences or obituaries it seems. That’s the way of the world.
Disclaimer: I don’t write topical pieces of contemporary or current kind. I don’t write occasional poetry of that kind either. Therefore, I explicitly state that this post was not occasioned by or is not even obliquely related to any famous self-inflicted fatal incidence in the recent past.
Amar Chitra Katha # 309 Veer Savarkar
For more information about and as an introduction to the series of posts on Amar Chitra Katha, read a previous post of mine.
R 1990: I was not more than eleven years old when I went to the book shop with my parents and chose this issue of ACK from the bundle of books I was given to choose from. The choice was not easy. It has never been easy, as nearly every one of the ACK issues in that buundle that I don’t have, is like a new and interesting friend calling me to play with it (read it that is). I had never heard the name of the gentleman before I took the book. Now that I’ve read this book and known the great man, I’m sure I’ll never forget him.
The guy was amazing! In fact, I learnt a trick from him. On the very first page he gives a book to a friend and there’s a revolver inside. He hollowed the space required for the revolver on the pages. I made a secret receptacle with less success in my personal diary (actually my grandfather’s diary from the previous year that he had no use of). When he read his elder brother’s poem or wrote a letter to his younger brother, I felt so sad for him, and so proud of him. When he tried to escape and jumped into the sea for that, I rooted for him and when they captured him, I felt so frustrated. I identified with the hero. His prophetic words when he came to know about his 50 years imprisonment gave me goose bumps. He questioned the person who gave him his tag whether the Empire would last that long!
R 2020 Reader : Veer Savarkar is a thirty-two pages long three hundred and ninth issue of Amar Chitra Katha, released on 1 May 1984. As the editor Anant Pai mentions in a box just after intrducing the prtagonist, it was based mainly on Savarkar’s autobiography My Trasnportation for Life. Sujata Bannerjee did the research work for the book. The illustrator, of course, is Ram Waeerkar. An important feature of ACK issues in the 1980’s and 90’s, a mid-book feature, in this specific case on Kaala Paani, provides relevant information.
The introductory note brings into play the contrast between a history (text)book and a comic book, albeit with an inversion. It blames the popular history books for omitting the sacrifices made and hardships faced by the freedom fighters who were sentenced ot kaala paani, i.e. imprisonment at the infamous Cellular Jail, Port Blair, Andman Island. Although Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was at Cellular Jail he did not submit to the atrocities meted out there. How? Because he always believed that India would win freedom.
Although the comic book mentions important dates in Savarkar’s life, unlike history books, it tries to present a man in flesh and blood, with his hopes and aspirations. Fear, although, is missing in the portrayal. Suicidal thoughts crossed his mind, but unlike his fellow prisoner Indubhooshan Roy, Savarkar defeated those thoughts and gave courage to others. All the tortures of that jail are demonstrated through him. Although he was sentenced to two life-imprisonments and his term of imprisonment was till 1960 he was transferred to anther jail first and then released in 1937.
R 2020 Critic: The present title is an addition to a long series of narratives, written with the benefit of hindsight, that complete the zigsaw puzzle of the ACK grand-narrative of impeccable, dauntless, visionary heroes of India. Before we go deeper into the analysis let me mention here that there was a General Election in India in the year this book was published. BJP won only two seats in 1984. Why would I mention election, a political party and politics here? Elementary, my dear friends!
V. D. Savarkar, or “Veer Savarkar” is one of the founding weavers of the grand narrative that was later recognized as Hindutva. Savarkar’s Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? is a seminal text upon the title term published first in 1923. Despite sixty years since its first publication and its popularity the book does not find mention in the ACK issue on Savarkar, not even in the box at the bottom of the introductory page. Not only that, the term Hindutva does not find mention even once in the book. It could be:
- just a coincidence
- an error
- an oversight
- an attempt at narrativizing in a manner that creates a specific kind of image of the hero in the impressionable mind of the members of the target reader
That it was not the first three is adequately demonstrated by the editor’s or/and researcher’s another convenient elision of the fact that starting from 1911, the year in which Savarkar was imprisoned, till 1920, his jail term was actually a series of rejected mercy petitions (eight in total at the rate of one every year, barring 1912 and 1916 only) either filed by him or by his wife. <https://www.theweek.in/theweek/cover/savarkars-life-in-jail.html>
That the tone of language of the petition is not brave, does not need any gloss or arguments to prove a point. Here’s an excerpt:
Moreover my conversion to the constitutional line would bring back all those misled young men in India and abroad who were once looking up to me as their guide. I am ready to serve the Government in any capacity they like, for as my conversion is conscientious so I hope my future conduct would be. By keeping me in jail nothing can be got in comparison to what would be otherwise. The Mighty alone can afford to be merciful and therefore where else can the prodigal son return but to the parental doors of the Government? Hoping your Honour will kindly take into notion these points.
<http://www.milligazette.com/Archives/2004/16-30Apr04-Print-Edition/1604200443.htm>
In contrast to Savarkar’s tone, courage can be clearly seen in Shaheed Bhagat Singh’s tone in a similar document:
As to the question of our fates, please allow us to say that when you have decided to put us to death, you will certainly do it.
You have got the power in your hands and the power is the greatest justification in this world.
We know that the maxim “Might is right” serves as your guiding motto. The whole of our trial was just a proof of that.
We wanted to point out that according to the verdict of your court we had waged war and were therefore war prisoners. And we claim to be treated as such, i.e., we claim to be shot dead instead of to be hanged.
<https://thewire.in/history/bhagat-singh-and-savarkar-a-tale-of-two-petitions>
Attempts at re-writing history or re-colouring it are justified citing past instances of the same. Well, in life and in history, two negatives don’t make a positive and no argument, not even might, can turn a series of lies into truth. Even if it’s hidden in the form of an apparently innocuous comic book.
Amar Chitra Katha # 262 Rashbehari Bose – A Great Revolutionary
As mentioned in a previous post, this post will present the responses of two versions (R 1990 and R 2020) of the writer to a title of Amar Chitra Katha. To simplify the matter R2020 will have two streams of thought – that of a reader, and that of a critic.
R1990:
Father brought a new comic book for me. The cover page has Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and Rashbehari Bose inspecting an army unit. I like its cover. It’s so different from the cover of Indrajaal Comics. Even the pages are better, and then, my parents don’t like my reading Phantom, Mandrake etc. The hero of the comic book is a boy a couple of classes senior to me. He is not afraid of his teacher and stands for truth even when he knows he’ll be punished. Who says that Bengalis are cowards? Before this one I had read Bagha Jatin and Subhash Chandra Bose. They too were brave Bengali revolutionaries.
Amar Chitra Katha is not like other comic books I have. Unlike Mahabali Shera, Bhootnath or Tarzan – all interesting stories of adventure- it does something different to me. It somehow makes me feel proud of my country and of its great and illustrious sons like the two Boses. Later in the same comic a sad Bose has to leave his beloved country. That reminds me of another such scene from another title, Veer Savarkar. I admire these men. Maybe I’ll serve my nation too when I grow up.
Bose’s love for his nation gets him the respect of the Japanese common people too. They help him in his cause and gave him respect. He tries to unite the Asian peoples against the British Empire and the Japanese army helped him too. Like Lala Lajpat Rai and Mahatma Gandhi, Bose was an Indian freedom fighter of international stature. Alas, he passed away in 1945 and could not see his country gain freedom!
R2020 – Reader:
Rashbehari Bose. Editor Anant Pai. Translator Meera Ugra. Script Prof. Satyavrata Ghosh and Luis M. Fernandes. Artwork Souren Roy. Published 1982, Reprint 1985.
The comic book introduces and criticizes the stereotype of the Bengali cowardice in its very first page where the History teacher gives the example of how Bakhtiyar Khilji and his merely 17 cavalrymen took one district. The young Bose opposes it with facts and is expelled from school. He faces the stereotype again, then as “Bengalis don’t know how to fight”. Bose is stung by the insult and decides to show the world how wrong it is. In a way his patriotism and his response to the Bengali essentialization are equally responsible for his later career.
The comic book mentions another Bengali revolutionary Bagha Jatin (ACK # 156) in the passing. Thus underlining the fact the Bengalis are not cowards and they do know how to fight. Bose leads a group that plans for a national armed revolution in 1915, but they are betrayed from within and Bose has to flee. The final proof against the stereotype is Subhash Chandra Bose (ACK # 77) who takes the baton from the senior Bose and leads INA. Another volume (ACK # 364) will close the case with Khudiram Bose.
Ironically, he flees into the arms of one imperialist power (Japan) to take help against another (Britain). In fact, before that he had asked for arms and ammunitions from the Germans. Thus we see that unlike the official Congress ideology prevalent at the time, the Bengali revolutionaries did not hesitate in employing even tainted means for their goal of independence, and Pai does not hesitate in showing the same without any kind of intervention from the outside. On an interesting note, as complexion is a popular topic of discussion in the discourse of ACK, the English, Indian and Japanese peoples are shown with different skin colours. Within a race, the colour of individual faces is more or less homogeneous. The only Indian villain, the informant, is as fair as the policeman he gives information to. No woman is given any active role in the story. In fact the only time Bose’s wife speaks is when they get nationality, that too, for one sentence.
Add to that Ananda Math (ACK # 86), Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar (ACK # 108), Vivekananda (ACK # 146), Rabindranath Tagore (ACK # 136), Sri Ramakrishna (ACK # 260), Jagadis Chandra Bose (ACK # 325) and Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das (ACK # 344) and the picture of the Bengali contribution to India’s struggle for independence and to the development of Indian nationalism is definitely given more depth. That’s not all. The Bengali nationalist writer Bamkimchandra is given full attention as three of his novels are present in ACK list of titles: Ananda Math (ACK # 86), Kapala Kundala (ACK # 193) and Durgesh Nandini (ACK # 294). Pai had a vision and a definite view of nation and nationalism. He developed it through his titles that gave due weightage to the brave Sikh and Rajput warriors and great revolutionaries from other all over India.
R2020 – Critic:
Amar Chitra Katha titles almost always conform to a predicatable driving agenda. Anant Pai may not have consciously (or he may have, who knows?) planned to write potent propaganda for Indian nationalism, Hinduism, Brahmanism, masculinity and patriarchy, but he ended up doing just that, and not just once, more than four hundred times in a row. He acknowledged in his interviews that his comics had contributed in their small way to the “integration” of India, which is made up of hundreds of ethnic groups, by teaching children about its history and legends” << https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/world/asia/01pai.html >>. Well, that was what he liked to think, and he repeated it so many times that people started thinking that about ACK too. Truth is different. In an interview << https://web.archive.org/web/20110721181046/http://www.readingrainbow.in/interview-pai.shtml >> he talks about the source of his mythological titles. It’s books published from Gita Press, Gorakhpur. It is actually their agenda that was channeled into ACK. His historical stories took a lot of research too. The idea was “to strike a balance between scholarly research, educational values, honest depiction of the past, national integration and targeting and marketing” (the same interview).
The idea of honesty in depiction is very difficult to reconcile with the stated objective of national integration. Add to that the financial concerns and honsety is either removed from the driving seat or is conveniently redifined. National integration is achieved at a cost in ACK and that cost is homogenization and simplification of the past. Children could not work that out and their parents untrained in the insidious ways of indctrination and brainwashing never suspected the harmless looking “comic book” of having such powers. The larger narrative of nation as Hindu was underscored title after title meant for children, both in case of Gita Press booklets like Veer Baalak, Chokhi Kahaniyan etc. and in case of the ACK titles.
Rashbehari Bose may be taken as a case study of how Pai worked out the not-so-unwritten agenda of ACK. First of all, all the actions of the protagonist are portrayed in it as parts of one complete whole, as if life worked in that way. All the pieces come together by the end and Bose’s life-long struggle leads to the independence of his motherland. Title after title, in nearly all the titles mentioned above, the same simplistic plan is put in action. Out of thirty pages full of coloured frames only four show a woman speaking, that too in response to a man’s statement. The fault is not in the story line, it’s in the selection of protagonists and themes of ACK titles that tends to favour maculine, brahmanical, patriarchal narratives.
ACK in a postmodern, postcolonial and theoretically informed age
What is a post on Amar Chitra Katha doing in a blog that’s primarily on Varanasi? Well, one look at the name of the blog will explain it. This blog is the coming together of me and my city and also about our relation. It’s also about how my past was structured, how it made me and what I make of it now. One important constituent of my past was stories. It all began with my grandmother’s stories. From there it went to a couple of books I found lying around at our place. I specially remember having access to a hardbound, often used copy of Adhyatm Ramayan, probably a Gita Press publication, random issues of Kalyan, again by the same publisher, a Betaal Pacchisi, probably from either Thakur Prasaad or Kheladilaal, Kachori Gali, Varanasi (Alas, there are no kachoris there anymore!).
The next set of books that supplied me with stories was mainly Chandamama and Amar Chitra Katha. Of course, there was Nandan, Champak, Paraag, Lotpot, Madhu-Muskaan etc. but the two books mentioned before them were regularly bought and brought home. I later discovered Indrajaal Comics with Phantom, Mandrake, Bahaadur, Rip Kirby, Garth, Buz Sawyer, Flash Gordon and many more superheroes, courtesy my neighbor Pappu Bhaiya’s really large collection. I envied him then, and I envy him even today as his collection, passed on to his younger brother, is probably still larger than mine, and of course, he is the original and I just an imitation turned original. Indrajaal Comics never had the respectability and (read, my parents’) acceptability of ACK and Chandamama. Here Mahabali Shera, Bhootnath, Ram-Rahim, Motu-Lambu, Chacha Chaudhri and Saabu, Billu, Pinki, Shrimatiji, Faulaadi Singh, Tarzan and tarzan’s Son (Kiran Comics), Superman etc. and many pocket size novel for children (Udham Singh is a title I still remember with pride) must also find mention. They were always with me back then.
Today, when I look at the comics from that era that I saved, and later supplemented with those procured from my trips to raddiwalas, roadside stalls, second hand book stalls etc. I find that ACK, Indrajaal Comics and Chandamama make the major portion of my collection. ACK had had many roadblocks in its journey since 1990’s. I discovered at least a couple of times for long stretches that my regular shop (Universal Book Co.) did not have any new copies of it. Thankfully, someone or other always took to publishing it and it’s alive. Although I don’t like the post-2010 ACK’s as much as I like the older ones, yet I’m happy that the old friend is still there. Chandamama could not survive. I got the shock of my life when my daughter turned eight-nine and I decided that it was the right time for her to have her own collection of the same. I went looking for Chandamama and discovered that they stopped publishing it ten years ago. I still am waiting for them to start publishing it.
So, let’s return to ACK. I recently took stock and discovered that I have 113 copies in print form only, 98 copies in both print and soft forms and 103 copies in soft form only. That makes 314 titles in total. The boy who read ACK (let’s call him R1990) and the man who reads about and posts on ACK (this one is R2020) are very different persons, aren’t they? Externally and physically a definite yes, but I am not so sure about the core. For “the core, once formed, tends to remain stable”, I’ve heard (if not, then I’m just making it up, but it sounds good). Before we go deeper into that lane, let’s take a detour towards the theoretically informed critic-readers, critics and occasional readers, and once readers and now critics of ACK. They demonstrate, with examples, that ACK performed the function of confirming many dangerous Hindu-Indian biases. The charge against it is that it propagated biases, and some of them are:
- the notion of patriarchy as a norm
- the idea of an essential Savitri (incidentally, a title I’m a proud owner of) like Indian woman
- the idea that India is equal to Hindu through its majority of Hindu heroes fighting against either Muslim invaders or emperors or British exploiters or empire
- the assumed equation of moral/narrative source of goodness in fair complexion and that of evil in its dark counterpart
- the establishment and propagation of the idea of a continuous Hindu collective past of India through its titles
For R1990 who did not know anything about those charges, the biases did not matter and he just read and enjoyed his ACKs. R 2020 knows about many of those charges but that does not matter, he does not buy or read ACKs anymore. Yet, I believe that R2020 ought to engage the naïve R1990 in a dialogue, especially on the titles he especially liked and enjoyed. Let’s see what happens when they talk in the posts to come.
Bahti Ganga by Shivprasad Mishra ‘Rudra’
There was an almirah in my grandfather’s house. Of course there were many other interesting things there viz. a prism, a magnate, neatly arranged sparkling test tubes, a little flask with a cute little stopper, a brass compass, a room that was always kept locked, a grave of frogs in the garden, a turtle that my uncle used to spot during the monsoons and never I, a huge field behind the house where one could spot a buck and a peacock sometimes, a dingy room covered with corrugated tin sheet in which my uncle used to keep his barbell, plates and dumb bells, two nun chucks, a pair of badminton rackets dangling from nails placed symmetrically on the left and right of a door, two long wooden almirahs full of treasures that brought water to my mind’s mouth (some of them still tantalize me so much that I want to just ‘borrow’ them), and that brings me back to the topic of almirahs.
So, there was that almirah in the room where my grandfather used to sit in his long armchair. There was the provision of lock in that almirah but I never saw an actual lock on it. Who’d dare to open it in his presence? My interest in that almirah dates from the time period that begins a couple of years after his passing away. I don’t remember how, but it so happened that by some accident I got a glimpse of its top two shelves full of books, some of them carefully covered with brown paper, others with colourful jackets beckoning me with their invisible fingers. I never knew or suspected their existence. I don’t know how I convinced my eldest aunt who had inherited the room, the almirah and the books, to let me touch them with my fingers made of human leather. I had a reputation for destroying things, especially those that are valued by the civilized people all over the world. I sure must have behaved very gentlemanly for over a month to deserve a liberty like that. In fact I somehow managed to please my aunt enough in the course of time to be blessed with the gift of one collection of short stories that came from that treasure house of books. I have kept that book safe till today.
Before that I just used to take her permission to read a book and sat in that very room to finish it, or to read as much as I could in one sitting and then return for more in my next sitting. I vividly remember two books from that collection even today. It becomes important because: one, I have a notorious memory, and two I did not know till very recent past that I had remembered not only the books but also their story lines, and in one case, probably a few photographic plates within one of them. The book with those photographs was Prithvi Vallabh.
The other book was Shivprasad Mishra “Rudra”‘s Bahti Ganga. I had actually forgotten the name of the second book and everything about its existence until I bought that book online one day. By the time I had read the third and the fourth stories, those of Dataram Naagar and Bhangar Bhikshuk respectively, I knew where and when I had read those stories for the first time. No, it was not déjà vu. You may want to ask how I can be so sure about that. Well, I have experienced that unsettling feeling too, and I know the difference between reminiscence and déjà vu.
For want of a more appropriate category let’s place it in that of historical fiction. So, this series of short stories in the form of quasi-historical fiction was first published in 1952. There are seventeen stories in the collection starting with the birth of Chait Singh, who would become the king of Varanasi in 1770. The author did not want the reader to take it as merely a “story”, and he makes it amply clear by giving it a very significant title that also performs the function of connecting it to the Hindu tradition of beginning an auspicious enterprise with the praise of Lord Ganesha. “Gaiye Ganpatii jagbandan” is from the hymn of praise for Lord Ganesha from Saint-poet Goswami Tullsidas’s Vinay Patrika. The poet had spent a long and significant part of his active writing life in Varanasi. The poet, the poem, the phrase and its strategic positioning perform multiple cohesive and defining functions before the reader starts reading the text. The titles of most of the stories are lines or phrases from famous folk songs or poems e.g. “Ghode pe hauda au hathi pe jeen”, “Nagar jala kalapaniya”, “” Sooli upar sej piya ki”, “Sivnath-Bahdursingh ka”, “Ehi thaiyan jhulni herani”, “Chait ki nindiya” etc.
The next story is again from a phase of Chait Singh’s life. It’s from 1781, the year in which the King’s loyal subjects had routed Hasting’s force and had made forced him to flee ignominiously from the city. The story introduces Dataram Naagar, and the next story that takes place nearly two years after that performs the function of placing him in the tradition of Babu Nanhkusingh Najeeb, the hero of Jaishankar Prasad’s short story “Gunda“. The author makes the outlaws of the East India Company or of British era hero of many of his stories. In doing so he follows the tradition of Prasad’s story mentioned above. In one more way he follows the pattern set in “Gunda”. He makes a courtesan or a prostitute one of the important characters of many of his stories.
Before we go any further, let me mention here for those who know the city of Varanasi, its lanes, ghats, temples and general layout, for such readers these stories are of additional interest. “Rudra Kashikey” belongs to the city and his prose is steeped in his love for Kashi, another name for Varanasi. And yes, unlike what I did at the end of the previous sentence, he does not explain all that gives a strong local flavour to his stories. He leaves it to the reader’s previous knowledge of the city, or to his willingness to research and understand it better. His target reader is definitely not in the West.
The events in fourth story take place six months after Nagar was sentenced to imprisonment at a jail in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, i.e. in 1784. It’s the story of Bhangad Bhikshuk, a rebel friend of Dataram and the man responsible for the graves of Englishmen near Chait Singh’s palace at Shivala. Thus we see that the first four stories are more or less interlinked. They can and should be read as one unit. The author has probably such intentions when he refuses to put his work in the pigeon holes of either a novel or a short story. It’s both, and more.
The story of Dataram Nagar and that of his friend do have a definite love angle. In fact, many of the stories in the collection are woven around the theme of heterosexual love, expressed or unexpressed. The next love story, judged from the contextual evidences, especially due to the mention of the name of the District Magistrate Mr. Bird, is set in 1809, the year of great Hindu-Muslim communal riots in the city and introduces Prasidha Narayan Singh, the King’s brother and Rakiya aka Multani, a Muslim girl of eleven or twelve years. For Rakiya to even desire for the King’s brother is impossible. She does the impossible and loves him till the end of her life at the age of fifty-eight in September 1858. The Shivnath-Bahadursingh story is set in nearly the same time period (approximately 100 years before 1952, i.e. around 1852), and is narrated by an old man, instead of an omniscient third person narrator.
“Ehi Thaiyan Jhulni Herani O Rama” and “Ram-kaj Chanbhangu Sharira” are set during the Boycott of foreign clothes in the Non-Cooperation Movement, more specifically before and after 6 April 1921. Dulari and her love for Tunnu feature in both of them but in the second story another love story from the time of Ram Halla on 15 April 1891 is added towards the end. The master narrative of “Mrisha Na Hoi Dev Rishi Vaani” takes place on 15 August 1947. The story is about Baba Kinaram’s curse to King Chet Singh in 1770’s or 80’s. So, the stories cover nearly two centuries of the history of Varanasi, from mid-eighteenth century to mid-twentieth century. Kashiraj Chait Singh is a significant presence and although not a protagonist, he joins many stories of the book. From kings to the common man, “Rudra Kashikey” succeeds in bringing them together to tell the story of one city he loved, a city that has so many names: Kashi, Varanasi, Banaras, Benares, Avimukt, Mahashmashan, Anandvan and many more
Mishra, Shivprasad ‘Rudra’. Bahti Ganga. New Delhi: Radhakrishna, 2010. Print.
rajnishmishravns 