Some Hindi Books and a Poem by Amitabh Bachchan

Vacation over and I am back from the ancient city of Pataliputra (link to Wikipedia entry. Has this great line, "In spite of the very bad press, Patna has a moderate crime rate." Hmmm.) Anyway, it was a regular home visit. Attended a cousin sister's marriage. And for those who were worried(!) my own marital status is not changing anytime soon!

Now for the main thing. I was reading lots of Hindi books at home. And since the online world contains so little information about Hindi literature (I am sure it is true for other Indian languages too) I thought I should add something to the blogosphere. More detailed posts will follow.

Will start with a book which both shocked and disappointed me. Rahul Sankrityayan was one of the most important and widely travelled scholars of his time. He spent most of his life travelling to far off places, learning different languages, collecting manuscripts and translating them into Hindi and other languages. His most important contribution was to the study of ancient and medieval Buddhist literature. He went to Tibet and spent many years there, mastering the Pali language and translating ancient Buddhist texts into Hindi and English. He was also known as Mahapandit (the great scholar). Now the shock and the disappointment part. I was reading his biography (actually it should be called hagiography) of Stalin and was shocked to see the level of ignorance and muddle headed propaganda in the book. It doesn't come as a surprise that his main sources are the "official" histories, interviews, memoirs and other documents published in the Russian language (he was obviously an expert in Russian too). He paints the portrait of Stalin as Mahamanav. He skirts and sweeps issues like the horrors of multiple famines, gulag, Hitler-Stalin pact etc under the carpet. He extols the ingenious five-year plans, the rapid industrialisation, Soviet Union's remarkable progress on the journey towards a classless society. Most of this praise is interspersed with merciless invectives towards the capitalists, Trostykites, Mensheviks, the Nomenklatura, the Kulaks and other enemies of the proletariat and the Soviet Union. I was surprised because I hadn't expected such language from a scholar, specially from someone who was known for his literary sensibilities. In the foreword to this book he mentions his desire to pen similar biographies of other "Mahapurush" like Marx, Lenin and Mao Tse-tung too. A look at his works informed me that he indeed wrote all of these, all within a year!

Anyway, all of this is written in a really high-falutin (in a nice way) and fluent Hindi and I read the whole book just for its prose. Also, I think the general euphoria was kind of understandable given the time when he wrote the book, Stalin had just died and the historic Khruschev speech, after which the official communist line tried to distance itself from Stalin, was still a few years ahead. Earlier I had picked up his Volga se Ganga Tak, the book for which he is most widely known. The book recounts the story of the Aryan Migration in a novelistic manner. I didn't finish the book because I soon got bored with it. (It was many years ago.) I was looking for it this time at home but couldn't find it. Anyway here is the wiki entry and here is another article about his life and works.

Peeli Chatri Wali Ladki by Uday Prakash is one of the most widely discussed Hindi stories (it is actually a novella) of the last few years. I hadn't read anything by Uday Prakash before and it was a nice surprise. I look forward to reading more of his work. It is a very intriguing story with lots of surprises. I will write in detail about it later. Incidentally I later came to know that an English translation of the story won the international PEN award last year for best translation into English. The English version is called The Girl with a Golden Parasol. The award sounds justified. I would have definitely called it "yellow umbrella" which sounds a little too banal! Some information about Uday Prakash here.

I also read an anthology of modern (as in "modernist") short stories and was pleasantly surprised to discover a few stories and writers which I had not read before. One of them was Mannu Bhandari whose story Yehi Sach hai (this is the truth) is a delightful account of a love triangle. The summary would sound banal. It is actually about a young girl in her mid-twenties who is unable to decide which one of her loves has "the truth". The one who dumped her years ago when she was a teenager, who she meets again and her old feelings are reignited or her current boyfriend? The story is told in a series of diary entries and offers brilliant insights into the mind of the girl and explores the problems of indecision and uncertainty that goes with every romantic relationships, at least for people who are a little too self-aware of their feelings and character, like that girl in the story. Easily one of my favourite love stories ever. I later came to know that the story was made into a Hindi film Rajnigandha. I think I have seen it but don't remember anything about it. Anyway, I don't think any film can capture the introspective tone and inner struggles of the mind as well as a written story.

I then jumped onto her story collection and found another gem titled Stree Subodhini (roughly, Lessons or Wisdom for Women) there. It is a hilarious first-person account by a woman who is now in her early forties about a love affair that she had when she was young with her middle-aged and married boss, who also writes (guess) romantic poems! It is very funny and is brilliantly insightful about how our ideas about gender roles come into conflict with any idealized notions of love or romance. It is a brilliant put-down of romance, that too without being cynical, rhetorical, dry or smartassy. It is very funny and very playful. Certainly a lesson all young women should learn. Hahaha!

Then there was this massive autobiography of the great Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan. It is in four volumes and I read bits and pieces from all fours. It is indeed beautifully written, very honest without being either a self-advertisement or self-flagellant. It is a gentle, unintellectual yet insightful about issues of literature and life and very touching at various moments. Actually, I have never liked his most famous poem Madhushala (The Tavern. Or is it The Pub? Or The Bar?), whose romanticism I always find a little too naive and youthful (ahem!) for my tastes. Bachchan discusses (and manages to defend too) Madhushala and other poems of the same period, which were all about the praise of life of escape into love and alcohol, very well. He wrote Madhushala at the peak of the nationalist struggle in the mid thirties. Gandhiji was predictably very pissed off with him because of this. What I was actually looking for was the episode of the death of his first wife Shyama and as expected it was really very well done. Bachchan was extremely attached and devoted to his wife and after her death he went into an inconsolable creative stupor which lasted few years. After that he wrote his best poems (my opinion of course). Nisha Nimantran (Invitation to Night, or is it Night's Invitation?), Aakur Antar, Ekant Sangeet and a few others. He also wrote poems about moving on and getting on with life despite losses like Jo Beet Gayi So Baat Gayi and Need ka Nirman Fir (which is also the title of one of the autobiography volumes). He soon met a sikh girl named Teji Suri and promptly fell in love. They got married couple of years afterwards and soon Amitabh and Ajitabh were born. This episode is also very interesting. Bachchan and Teji Suri meet at a common friend's house and request is made to Bachchan for a poem recital. He chooses one of his poems which express cynicism about love, titled Kya Karoon Samvednayein Lekar Tumhari ? (what do I do with your sentiments?). They were obviously attracted to each other from before but soon after the poem they were both in tears and they knew they were in love. I am making it sound childish and cheesy but you have to read the book (Need ka Nirman Fir, the second volume) to get the real thing. It works there, I assure you!

Okay so now coming to what I promised in the title of the blog. A poem by Amitabh Bachchan. The final volume also contains the episode of Amitabh battling for his life after he was injured while shooting for Coolie. While recovering at the Breach Candy Hospital in Bombay Amitabh scribbles the following lines in his notebook. His father translates those lines in Hindi. The Hindi version follows (in non-standard transliteration of course)

Breach Candy Hospital
ICU Room No. 1, Bombay
29th August 1982

Outside-Inside

Outside

Black
Granite ugly rocks
Turbulent mud-laden sea-
Dark frightening clouds hovering above-

Inside

Whiteness, purity
Clean sheets, soft pillows
Gentle care, soft words
Solitude
And my agony-

--Amitabh Bachchan

Bahar-

Upar mandrate, darpate
Andhiyala chhate se badal
Neeche, kali kathor bhaddi chattano per
Uchhal, matmaili jaladhi-tarangon ki kreeda

Bheetar-

Sab ujjwal, shuddh, saaf
Chadar safed, komal takiye,
Dheeme-dheeme swar se sinchit
Mamtamay sari dekh-rekh
Au' meri ekaki peeda

With the connection between "jaladhi-tarangon ki kreeda" and "Aur meri ekaki peeda" the Hindi translation works better in expressing a feeling of contrast between "outside" and "inside" than the English version by Bachchan Jr. Thats what I think. It is also comforting to know that even Amitabh feels lonely when in pain, that too when millions were ready to do anything for him. Anyway here's a link to Wiki entry of Harivansh Rai Bachchan.

I think this post has already become a little too long. I wanted to write about Yashpal, Phanishwarnath Renu, Nirmal Verma, Krishna Sobti and others too but all those for later posts.

More on Nirmal Verma

I remember reading an article by Rajendra Yadav, the editor of the very prestigious Hindi literary magazine Hans and a writer of significant repute himself, where he criticized Nirmal Verma for what he thought was his soft hindutva. I don't remember the exact line of his argument now, but the basic point was that Verma and some other writers like Shailesh Matiyani, with their soft-hindutva and spiritual mumbo-jumbo are helping the sangh-parivar by giving the Hindu revivalist movement a good name. I remembered this essay as I was looking up on Internet to find something to read about Nirmal Verma. I found this interview on Hindu Vivek Kendra (a site dedicated to Hindu revivalism). On asked about how Indian and European cultures are different he says:

On the basis of three sets of relationships: those of time, nature and self (atman). We were under a severe negative attack from Western civilisation. Nature for them is an object to be appropriated, because man is at the centre of the universe. And Time is measured by them in fragments of past, present and future. The past is overcome by the present, which in turn takes you to the future. Even for Max Mueller, India's "past was glorious" but its present merely a ghostly remnant of the past, and the future depended on its Europeanising itself.

Although he forgets that the western scientific tradition also produced Galileo and Darwin who demolished the Christian anthropocentrism. But overall, I think this is a valid argument but I could understand the problems people like Rajendra Yadav or even myself have when he says this about secularism and western civilizaztion:

Because of this concept of Dharma, there was no divide between the religious or spiritual, and the secular or civic life. This division began in Europe with the rupture with divinity during the Renaissance. The divine stayed with the church, and the civic with the society, which placed man centrestage. That may have led to the glory of the Renaissance but its ultimate consequence was also the ego-centred view of man in Nazi ideology.

I am fully aware of the ongoing debate on the secular versus the spiritual. But indian civilisation had an integrated approach to sansara or lok (this world) and the spiritual, parlok (the other world). Dharma is the harbinger of all our transactions in both, this world and beyond. This was the most important concept of Gandhism. Gandhi never used the word secular when talking of Hindu-Muslim unity. The religious and the secular were not separate but a confluence that nourished Indian civilisation.

This is just plain wrong. First, saying that the Nazi ideology had its roots in enlightenment rationalism and second resorting to obfuscation, that somehow secular and spiritual can be merged together. It is this kind of fallacious thinking that has enabled politicians to play politics in the name of secularism in India. What I don't understand is that in his stories and novels there is no writer, even among those who write in English, I find more "European" than him! No wonder people like Yadav were furious.

On a more positive note I found another interview on the same site, where he defends Rushdie's freedom of speech. As against Khushwant Singh who gives some really lame and sorry excuses. I also didn't know that Khushwant Singh (himself a writer of an almost-porn novel) advised the Indian publishers not to publish Rushdie's book! Talk about irony!

And here is a nice article by the noted literary critic Vishnu Khare from Frontline when Verma got the Jnanpith award a few years back. He sums up Nirmal Verma's themes very well:

Nature, especially hilly or northern European grass, flowers and trees, rains and monsoon clouds, sunshine, moonlight, tender animals, circuit houses, dak bungalows, civil lines, servants' quarters, aging colonial houses, Western cities such as Prague, Vienna and London, convents, churches, hospitals, town squares, walks and gardens, restaurants and concert halls, sausages, beer, chianti and cognac, Chopin and Mozart - all these populate his short stories and novels. Love, separation, abortion, divorce, alienation, lack of dialogue and mutual understanding between most intimate relations, nostalgia, guilt and repentance over unnamed things done and undone, secrets and mysteries and horror of relationships and psyche, mental masochism and sadism, death wish, death and the conjuring up and eternal presence of the dead, all enveloped in brooding, pitying tenderness, are Nirmal Verma's recurring themes.

Doesn't look like a healthy list? But then who needs sugary ideas in this age of Coelhos, Dan Browns and those predator self-help gurus? I, for one, will do well with some bitter medicine. Too bad, I don't have any of his books here in Zembla!

Previous post here.

Nirmal Verma Passes Away

Nirmal Verma, one of the most famous of the modern Hindi writers, passed away yesterday. Although I don't consider myself very well read in Hindi (not that I am well read in any language) but I have read most of Verma's short stories and at least one of his novels (Lal Tin ki Chhat). His most famous story Parinde, which broke new grounds in form and heralded the nayi kahani movement, is still one of my all time personal favourites, in any language, even after 12-13 years when I first read it. I still remember the cold, foggy day, much as the weather in the story, when I finished the story completely overwhelmed with a most mysterious sadness. It was not the kind of sadness I associated with reading a sad book -- the kind of sadness, that just goes away or fades as soon as you close the book. Perhaps it was just something that I was too young to understand then because the story tackled the quintessential adult themes of death, human disconnection, memory, loss and regret. But even though I didn't understand all the finer motivations of the three main characters, they remained with me for long and I continued to worry about their fates. Did Lathika eventually marry again or did she leave the school and the hilly town? If yes, where did she go? Did Mr. Hubert eventually die of tuberculosis? What about Dr. Mukherjee? Did he change his mind or did he a get a chance to go back to his home?

In fact these feelings still return when I read the story and I read it at least once every year. But now, more enlightened as I am, I can understand why this was considered to be a revolutionary story in the modern Hindi literature. It must have broken almost all the literary conventions of the time. There were no farmers in his story, nor was any social reformism. There were no rapturous evocations of rural landscapes, nor any gushing over the triumph of the proletariat (or human spirit in general). Instead of looking outside at the society, Verma looked inside, into the consciousness of his characters and raised those eternal questions which plague our sorry existence on this earth, regardless of our class or gender. What are we doing here on this earth? Where are we going? Are we just like those migratory birds of the title of the story? He also did away with the elements of plot and caricature and instead focused on the ways in which those characters introspect themselves to find out answers to those questions.

And perhaps the most important convention he broke was the idea that a storywriter is basically a storyteller. Verma didn't want to just tell a story (an easy and entirely futile thing to do), he aimed to evoke a complex mood and feeling, things we generally associate with poetry or music, certainly not with prose. Curiously Verma did it without resorting to any overtly "poetic" language or creating innovative imageries. His prose is a model of simplicity and restraint. The best example of this writing is again in the story Parinde where Verma describes the effect of Music in the scene where Mr. Hubert plays Schubert on his piano and how it affects everybody in the dark room. It is simply marvelous. I don’t have the book with me right now so I can not provide any excerpts.

In these ways and the others, Verma is generally credited with bringing modern and European sensibilities to the Hindi literature and thus widening its horizons beyond what the progressive and social realist tradition had straitjacketed it into. He was 76 and his best work was behind him but even then his death does leave me very sad. At least with people like him Death does appear to be grossly unjust.
Here is something more.