Goa Art/lit Festival

          Goa Art/Lit Fest

The literati of Goa had an edifying time at Goa Art and Literary Festival early this month.  The collaborative event hosted and directed by ICG, had an impressive line-up of writers, performers and artists. The event is past but the discourse shall continue awhile.

The keynote address by Mitra Phukan, writer, translator and vocalist from Assam on comparative cultures of Goa and Assam, set the tone for the cultural/ ethnic/literary debates for the festival. She appreciated the inclusiveness of Goan culture and said that, “Culture, specifically the positive aspects of culture, is a soft power and a nation’s ambassador. It is the best defence, in the long run, against the forces of destruction. Art, literature, dance, music, and all the other ways in which humankind expresses emotions and thoughts are the moral compass that guide the people of a troubled land, and show the way forward. Classical literature is firmly rooted in values, the enduring moral values without which humanity itself would spiral down to barbarism, flounder and perish. The human mind is capable of rising to the greatest heights of creativity, beauty, compassion and love. It is also capable of sinking to the lowest depths of cruelty, depravity and ugliness. By celebrating the beauty of human creation, in an atmosphere of amity and understanding, we begin to appreciate its richness. That is why it is important to hold festivals, musical, literary, art, culinary, so that the beauties of the  human mind are foregrounded, obliterating the horrors, of which it is also, tragically, equally capable.”

The contingent of poets held centre stage one evening of the festival. Chris Mooney Singh an Irish –Australian poet and Sikh by choice, stood out with his flowing salt and pepper beard and red brown headwear. His rendition of ‘Ghazal of Belonging’ still reverberates in my mind.   His poems are a reflection of the Indian Panorama –

“Families of Dravidians intermarried with Aryans,

Families of Arabs, Afghans, Turks, Tartars,

Families of Moguls, families of White men

Families of Ram, Shiv, Kali-Durga,

 Families of Guru Nanak, Mahavir and Buddha

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra read out his translation of Songs of Kabir:

To tonsured monks and dreadlocked Rastas
To idol worshippers and idol smashers,
To fasting Jains and feasting Shaivites,
To Vedic pundits and Faber poets,
The weaver Kabir sends one message:
The noose of death hangs over all.
Only Rama's name can save you.
Say it NOW.

The engaging debate on reinvention of the epics, more so from a feminist point of view, involved many writers and readers. Visiting mythology writers like Pratibha Ray, Krishna Udayasankar, Samhita Arni, Shubha Vilas, provoked readers with their alternate perspectives of recreating the mythic tales through the voices of Sita and Draupadi. My session with Krishna Udayasankar was invigorating with her avant garde approach of terming her Aryavarta Chronicles  as Mytho-history.  Her quest is history as she turns the metaphor of mythology and reconstructs the reality of those times. Her stories derive not so much from faith as from science and logic. The land of Aryavarta is populated by commoners, nobles and forest dwellers, undergoing a socio-economic technological shift. The human characters divested of supernatural powers lead their lives and make decisions based on human trial and error paradigms. The very turn of event which humiliates and disrobes Draupadi is the moment when Krishna empowers her in her book ‘Kauravas’. She is a protagonist as much as Govinda Shauri (Krishna) in her recreation of the epic. The strains are similar to Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, a reworking of the Odyssey, in which Penelope and her hanged handmaidens tell their story which tradition did not allow them to do  in the original work.

Desi Writers Lounge from Pakistan spiced up the fest with a satirical/humorous performance of the British playright Mark Ravenhill’s play ‘Yesterday an Incident Occurred’ and readings from their biannual literary edition ‘Papercuts’. Their presentation on the online forum of ‘Crowd Funding’ was very informative and enlightening for entrepreneurs and cultural creatives alike. Translations and multilingual books evoked much interesting exchange between writers and translators like Musharaf Farooqi, Neeraja Matoo,  Gulzar Sahib…… Arvind Mehotra summed the discussion very well when he said, ‘Translation of the original text is like digging a tunnel from two ends. If your authentic, sincere attempt makes you meet somewhere in the middle of the tunnel, you have been successful, but if you don’t then we have two works of writing the original and the translation’

Artists like Amruta Patil, Michelle Farooqi, left an indelible mark on the audience with their works. Himanshu Suri , the Rapper enthralled guests in the evening live performance, and Kiren Rai, the Tarot master garnered quite a following for herself after her Tarot Reading session. Jerry Pinto hosted the poetry readings and was his spirited self throughout and made the dance floor come alive in the evenings.

I can’t seem to stop, and the write-up may appear as if I am name dropping , but there were so many luminaries who shone at the fest…. Well more in my next …………………

Krishna Udayasankar & Jugneeta Sudan : Mytho-History

 

 

   

                Mitra Phukan – Keynote address on the Essence of Cultures 

 Arvind Krishna Mehrotra : Translations and Songs of Kabir  

         

           Chris Mooney Singh : ‘Ghazal of Belonging’

Repossessing Mythology

  Mytho-Literature

Mythology lives on as the contemporary literary culture reworks, repackages and gives birth to the old in avant garde avatars.  It has become a specialized genre of writing in itself the world over. ‘Myth was there at the beginning of literature, and it is at the end of literature too.’ Myths are tales of ethereal beauty and the grotesque. They are custodians of our heritage and way of life. They house our thoughts, beliefs, social structures, secrets of creation, political hierarchies, and remote control our living in contemporary times.  Myths are iconic, legendary and have been buttressed and sanctified over centuries. Better stories have never been told. If a work of art makes a mark today, it is nothing but a repackaged myth set to modern conventions. Picasso when led to view the Paleolithic cave paintings felt that mankind has created nothing new.  Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is still an astounding piece of art because of its raw appeal, stark shapes, and basic form. No one has ever created stronger narratives or stronger characters than those the myths present to us.  Therefore, James Joyce set out to write the masterpiece Ulysses, (the Roman translation of Odysseus is Ulysses) a pastiche of the Odyssey . So, since it is a cliché that no new tales can ever really be told, authors return to the old ones, and see what a contemporary sensibility, psychology and language might make of them?  The Great Indian Novel by Shahi Tharoor is an example per se.

The reconstruction is being done from varied angles. Writers like Amish Tripathi and Krishna Udayasankar have used legends to probe and rediscover our assumptions. They seek history in mythology, by fleshing out Gods in human forms and reinterpret their stories and circumstance to appeal to our sensibilities of human trial and error. Defamilairization is a tool used by writers to give us an overworked myth from the perspective of unknown and unconventional angles. A fine example would be the big and tiny people in Gulliver’s Travels or Tom Thumb. The practice revokes the tale breaking it of all held conventions and we see it in a new light. Others have questioned and rebelled against established iconic legends like the question of whether the sacrifice of Sita was greater than Urmilla (Lakshman’s wife) in the epic  Ramayana. Similarly, Margaret Atwood in The Penelopiad reworks the Odyssey and gives space and voice to Penelope and the hanged handmaidens to tell their story and circumstances which tradition and history barred them from doing.  Panchali in Govinda by Udaysankar is married to the eldest Pandava brother only.  She questions her identity and role, and her quest is justice and individuation of women. Colm Tóibín, shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker prize, is a plaintive monologue by Mother Mary who recounts certain episodes in the life of her son, shor n  of the celestial powers that myth has empowered her with through the centuries. She pines for a comfortable home with her husband and son and wishes to be delivered of the cross that her child is ‘Son of God’ , she is a pained  mother  reliving the stings and arrows of atrocious misfortune that flesh is heir to. Myths are demythologized to unearth the history of mankind and on the other hand, they are also big literary forms to house the contemporary and let us see the present in a vivid defamiliarizing light.

 

The love affair of humanity with mythology shall continue and souls like Gandhi and Mother Teresa shall be sanctified as Gods after a few centuries. Humans will then demythologize them and rework their stories to arrive at the truth that existed then(now).

The Goa Art/Lit fest opened this week , and many a session  during the festival is based on mythology in everyday life with writers like Krishna Udayasankar and Pratibha Ray – Lets meet  there  and carry on the discussion……

Plumtopia Returns (PG Wodehouse)

Plumtopia Returns

                                             

Sebastian Faulks has dared to tread the sacred turf and impersonate the art of the PLUM, to a divided reception. Diehard fans of PG Wodehouse are outraged at Faulks sacrilegious feat of writing a sequel to the famous Jeeves-Wooster series. The other more tempered audience has expressed intrigue and admiration at his close imitation of Plum’s stylistic tropes and his sheer chutzpah to imitate the inimitable emperor of the English sentence. But I am not here to join a bandwagon and add fuel to the fiery furore.  Rather, it gives me an opportunity to celebrate and delve into the unceasing pleasure of Wodehouse utopian world – “Plumtopia” (courtesy: a blessed Plum fan)

Plum, as he was lovingly called by his dear ones, believed in the lightness of being.  He maintained a cheery disposition throughout his life. He did not involve himself in the everyday care of life, leaving it all in the able hands of his wife Ethel. Testing times of his life did not mark him adversely. On the contrary, he continued to write comic pieces and jested and broadcast humorous anecdotes after his internment with the Germans in the Second World War. The ugly   aftermath, which exiled him from his home country and expatriated him to United States, was born by him with genial happiness. Such a blessed soul could not help but paint an idyllic world in his writings, imbued with humorous phrase, wit and the comic unsurpassed.

His critics accused him of churning out the same story with variations over and over again.  And indeed, it is intriguing that his ardent readers awaited his next read eagerly, and haplessly absorbed his plots and delightful recurring characters ravenously. Many a writer has been lost to the dark recesses of forgetfulness but Wodehouse still sells along with contemporary bestsellers. The plots of his stories are intricate with neat twists and absurdity reigns supreme.  The Gentleman of gentlemen, the Edwardian Bertie Wooster, man of leisure but undyingly kind and honey sweet is pursued relentlessly by lay women and heiresses alike.  He finds himself unduly engaged, and in a mess in a country estate, not of his making, just everyday turn of innocuous events. Cogs in the chaotic situation could be more such incidents (of unpleasantness, inheritances or thefts) or men and women entangled through an intricate vicious web. Jeeves, the erudite Butler, is the only miracle man who can unwrangle the mess and set everyone free and good. Bertie and Jeeves appeared in 1915 and were reworked by the author till their last appearance in ‘Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen’ in 1974 when he was in his nineties. Non-Bertie novels, the Blandings  novels, The Uncle Fred series, The Psmith novels and stories from earlier years are indicative that his stories are somewhat repetitive in nature – but the fanatic adherence of his followers to his works is the magic of his language.  When we read him and assimilate him, the experience is like the man who drank his first glass of sparkling French wine.  The word bubbles whizz and fizz in the mind creating ripples of savory reading experience par excellence. 

The characters acquired a life of their own beyond his books.  Lord Emsworth and his pig, Mr Milliner, Jeeves…………are as alive as our real life best friends and we know them warts and all.  Their unfailing power to woo and enthrall us is bewildering beyond reason. Wodehouse, though indicted of creating scatterbrained female characters, evermore meddling, domineering and stubborn, is also credited with creating women who are feisty, bubbly, witty and with a mind of their own.  And these women were not always beautiful, young, rich or articulate to find love in their lives. The standard prerequisites of heroines in romantic novels of his age were subverted and they find love, companionship and joy irrespective of looks, age and size. A true feminist agenda. “Lord Emsworth’s nephew Wilfred  Allsop falls in love with his Uncle’s ‘pig-girl’ Monica Simmons, whose solid build and agricultural occupation could hardly be less feminine. Wilfred  Allsop objects strongly when his friend Tipton ‘Tippy’ Plimsoll points this out. “I’m sorry you think she looks like an all-in wrestler,’ he said stiffly, “To me,  she seems to resemble one of those Norse goddesses.  However,  be that as it may,  I love her, Tippy.  I fell in love with her at first sight.”  A blogger  writes , ‘In Wodehouse’s world, a man can have a crooked face and a cauliflower ear, yet reign supreme. Just as it should be.’

Psmith is the only character drawn from his own life. But he did not go on with him as an older man because he thought that what made him funny as a young boy could not be applied to an older version of him. Wodehouse always knew that wooly head Lord Emsworth living in a castle  was a hilarious character he had created and he stuck with him.  It isn’t every writer’s cup of tea to think of comic sequences. It’s only if you view life lightly, are amused at life’s twists and turns and are able to see the absurd in every person or situation , in short you are psyched with a funny bone , then you can dole out fiction like PLUM, like 100 books in his lifetime.  He read exhaustively, like Shakespeare complete works throughout his life.  And then, very skillfully he made a soufflé of Cicero,  Shakespeare and Spinoza and delivered it to his readers laced with the right dose of humor. 

He also broke the standard cliché that books sell if they have hot sex in them. The closest he came to sex in his books was a kiss on the cheek.  He felt that sex could be funny, but he refrained from it.  And wow, still his stories sell till today.

Delight in the world of PG Plum and deliver yourself from the captivity of life!

 

The Bard's Bards

                          The Bard’s Bards

Shakespeare lives on in our lives subtly, unconsciously and pervasively. If we were to pay more attention to our daily English conversational exchanges we would be astounded to note that our talk is sprinkled copiously with phrases from the Bard’s writings.

 Hot-blooded.
 I have not slept one wink. 
Love is blind. 
Make your hair stand on end. 
Neither rhyme nor reason. 
Too much of a good thing. 
We have seen better days

Wild goose chase

A fool's paradise

A sorry sight

Brevity is the soul of wit

To be or not to be

What is in a name

Et tu Brutus

His skilled use of certain common phrases lent them an air of extraordinariness, and he further devised many original phrases of his own, with special effects ( like the last one).  These ordinary and not-so-ordinary  words grouped together as conceptual units (phrases) have become a part of the modern English language through its evolutionary history since the time of the Bard. When we speak in English, our talk is intimately laced with Shakespearean quotes and phrases, being applied everyday to new situations, circumstances, events, places and people.

Now, isn’t that exhilarating?  Like being part of a greatness without a conscious effort, as if it’s a gift to all  humanity (since English is a global language) to be used exhaustively without even reading his extensive works.  An everyday example would be –

The wild goose chase led us to places which made our hair stand on end. We were a sorry sight by the end of it, we have seen better days, you see.

But the interesting facet is to know the origin of a phrase that one uses frequently.  The context in which  it was used by the Bard in his plays and verses.

The course of true love never did run smooth -This expression derives from  A Midsummer Nights Dream, 1598:

LYSANDER:
Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth;
But, either it was different in blood,--

Many a true word is spoken in jest -The first author to express this thought in English was probably Geoffrey Chaucer. He included it in The Cook's Tale, 1390:

But yet I pray thee be not wroth for game; [don't be angry with my jesting]
A man may say full sooth [the truth] in game and play.

Shakespeare later came closer to our contemporary version of the expression, in King Lear, 1605: Jesters do oft prove prophets.

Something is rotten in the State of Denmark.
A feeling that something fishy or suspicious is going on. Hamlet: The character Marcellus states this when Hamlet is hallucinating and seeing the ghost of the recently deceased king. This phrase is especially used when describing scandals.

Fair play.

 Miranda: "Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, and I would call it, fair play." The Tempest, 1610

If music be the food of love, play on. Let us just go on dropping bard lines, ‘cause the be all and end all of all is that the World ‘s a stage and men and women mere players , who have their exits and entrances, or stuff that dreams are made on , our little life without rhyme or reason , may not be just a walking shadow, full of sound and fury , but touching heights, for what a piece of work is man . 

Historical Fiction wins the Booker

Winging Historical Fiction !

Another historical fiction wins the Man Booker Prize again! That too, a new writer on the bloc Eleanor Catton for her tomb of a book ‘The Luminaries’, based on the gold rush in Victorian New Zealand.  Before her, the British author Hilary Mantel bagged it twice for her historical narrative on the reign of Henry VIII. Historical fiction, a specialized genre of writing, seems to be giving an edge to other forms of writing, not that it has not won accolades for authors through the times, but consecutive wins have added to its enigmatic flavor.

Historical fiction, a wonderful and satisfying blend of storytelling and history, lends an aura of mystic to the otherwise dry, prosaic and academic pursuit of history.  Historical fiction writing is like making a period film. The frames have to come alive with meticulous details of life in that period of history. The author has to conjure up the times, imbuing it with the authentic aromas of sight, smell and taste unique to that span of time. The fashion and clothes that people wore, the language and dialects they spoke, (River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh), the belief systems that perpetuated the society, the religion that communities followed, the political  and social set-ups , the economy and trade of the people….. such that when we read the book, we enter the scene in history and breathe and feel the feel of the place and duration in time as a palpable truth ; the then becomes now. Historical narrative in the hands of a skilled writer acquires the scope of a Tolstoy, the depth of a Dickens and the pace of a thriller, a fatal unputdownable reading experience par excellence. I would any day pick up a historical narrative or watch a period film rather than pursue a historical record to explore history.  Just waiting to lay my hands on Catton’s work!

Historical novels, the winners make a long list.  My earlier reads would be Roots by Alex Hailey, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.  Roots left an indelible impression on my youthful mind of the long-long journey from slavery to freedom, about the trials and tribulations of men, of mastery of humans over other men, of subjugation, fight for freedom, search for identity, racism, oblivion of entire cultures and rich heritage and hybridization. Anna Karenina’s search for truth in relationships mirrors a hypocritical society mired in supercilious wealth and hollow principles. Gone With the Wind, set against the civil war background, glorifies the South and demonizes the North, centering on a sympathetic depiction of slavery and the Klu Flux Klan. My recent reads have been Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies. To be able to bag the coveted booker prize in quick succession for the two sequels of her trilogy on Tudor History is equally astounding and bewildering.  But I would rather not delve into the intricacies of the process of deciding a Booker winner, for the subject of historical fiction writing intrigues me more. Wolf Hall is a book which portrays the break from Rome, a process where one man is wolf to another and the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon.  Bring up the Bodies deals with the reign of the second Queen Anne Boleyn, and at the end, her execution ordered by Henry himself.  Further researching and reading the Tudor history, you discover why the cocktail ‘Bloody Mary’ is called such. The latter, the daughter of the first queen ordered the beheading and slaying of innumerable courtiers from the reign of Henry VIII, because the state reverted back to a Catholic state and the Church became  supreme again for a time.  Intervening these have been other very interesting books like The Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.  A story of a domestic help who, because of her intelligent disposition and sensitivity, becomes a confidante of the famous painter, Vermeer. The ensuing relationship paints a portrait of Vermeer’s work, personality, household and 17^th century Delfit town. ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison haunted me just as she haunts the home of her mother who mercy-killed her to save her from a life of slavery.  One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the delineation of a fictional town Macondo and the story of a noble, ridiculous, beautiful family, a reflection of all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.

Back home, I have thoroughly enjoyed revisiting history through the works of Amitav Ghosh. He said of his work, ‘The Glass Palace, “one can examine the truths of individuals in history definitely more completely in fiction than one can in history”. The release of the first two books of the Ibis trilogy engrossed me further. The books outdo theory as well as history in terms of its subtle treatment of colonialism.  Amitav’s broad canvas in the books is big enough to include insights into 20^th century Burma after the 3^rd Anglo Burmese War in 1885 and the Opium Wars between China and Britain – a classic portrayal of British hegemony and despotism.  Before these, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children and Enchantress of Florence held me captive with their stylistic writing technique of magic realism used superbly to portray the birth of a nation and in the latter, the Mughal Courts and the Medici family of Florence. The Twentieth Wife by Indu Sundaresan  transports the reader to the court of Prince Salim and his involvement with Mehrunissa, the wife of an Afghan commander, who with the turn of history becomes the empress of the Mughal empire – Nur Jahan.

History is the story of mankind on earth.  Classics, from Homers’ Odyssey,  Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, Shakespeare’s Othello,  ‘The Qissa of Heer Ranjha’ by Waris Shah to contemporary literature,  portray the tales of man which are ever repetitive.  These great classics live on and can never die, for human nature and behavioural patterns recur again and again. Historical fiction intrigues, baffles, astounds, disgusts and imbues us with more such emotions – and the question remains , ‘Do we really learn from history?’  Primary aim of life is to live it forwards, but we can learn only when we look backwards. ‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it’, seems to hold more true for mankind.