The Artist & the Forger

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                                                  The Artist & the Forger

 ‘Egon Schiele: Death and the Maiden’, the most haunting painting of the 20^th century, hangs in the Baroque Belvedere Palace in Vienna. The same title film by Austrian director Dieter Berner was one of the art films at IFFI this year. The other art film ‘A Real Vermeer’ directed by the Dutch filmmaker Rudolf van den Berg was a biographical film of art forger Han van Meegeren.

The former depicts the life of avant garde Viennese artist Egon Schiele who proclaims, “I shall endure for art.” And endure he does, in dark times through the love and staunch support of his sister Gerti and lover Wally. His bohemian lifestyle and relationship with muse Wally in provincial Austria get him in trouble with the authorities. Being the most provocative artist of his times, he steadfastly stands by his art in court, declaring that his paintings of female child artists are highbrow art-“This is art and not pornography!”

The painting from which the film derives its title depicts two lovers clinging to each other seemingly on the edge of an abyss. It is moving, disturbing and disruptive beyond belief. It hints at the end of a relationship and also the end of the world. “Clasp me as if it is the last time you will do so,” says Egon to Wally before painting the piece. He personifies himself in the painting as Death/Dracula holding his love in a vice-like grip– an antithesis to love.  One of the most self-obsessed artists, he painted this work at a turning point of his life, when he was abandoning his first great love and was about to be swept away by the First World War.

“It’s no coincidence that ‘Ego’ is the beginning of Egon Schiele’s name. He was a narcissist, who was very interested in the visceral experiences of his life. He was obsessed by sex and death in equal measure,” say art critics.

His self-portraits exude a wild energy. ‘Self-portrait with Physalis’ from 1912 is his best known one. Dutch genius Rembrandt executed 40 self-portraits during his artistic career and he was obsessed with the aging image of himself. Van Gogh, one of the greatest self-portraitist of the 19^th century in his ‘Self-portrait with the Bandaged Ear’ is depicting his emotional and physical decline. But Schiele’s works are imbued with an incessant rebellious strain, a brutal honesty about human body and sexuality. He seems to have internalized Freud and his ‘Theory of Sexuality.’ 

Studies on Egon Schiele state, “His work is often described as pornographic, grotesque, even disturbing and too explicit, and today it simply represents one of the finest examples of modern art, created by a remarkable artist who was able to capture the essence of the human existence in an unprecedented and inimitable manner.”

On the other hand, in the second art film ‘The Real Vermeer’, the story of Meegeren, the master forger, is played out in Netherlands during the Second World War.  Mysteriously, unknown biblical paintings of the 17^th century Dutch artist Vermeer start reappearing in the late 1930s in Amsterdam. They cause quite a sensation and are hailed by the art world. The famous art historian Dr. Abraham Bredius examines the forgery ‘The Supper at Emmaus’ in September, 1937 and says, “This is a genuine Vermeer masterpiece, using the ultramarine blues and yellows preferred by Johannes Vermeer and other Dutch Golden Age painters.” The confirmation precipitates in the forged paintings being sold at very high prices.

Meergen makes a fortune and buys a lot of property, jewellery and works of art to augment his luxurious lifestyle. He tells the interviewer, Marie Louise Doudart de la Grée, “I own 52 houses,15 country houses around Laren, among them ‘grachtenhuizen’, beautiful mansions along the famous Amsterdam canals.”

One of Meergen’s Vermeer forgery ‘Christ with the Adulteress’ is discovered by the Allies in an Austrian salt mine after the end of the war, along with  6,750 other pieces of artwork looted by the Nazis. The painting is traced back to Meergen. Now, he has to choose between being sentenced to death for being a Nazi collaborator or exposing himself as a forger.

Rudolf van den Berg, the director of the film made the original story his own and then retold it in the film by digressing from it, bringing in a romantic angle. In real life, Meergen never parted from his wife and children. His siblings too regarded him as an affectionate and warm person. But his art at counterfeiting had excelled to a point where he was able to turn the court proceedings in his favor. He came out a Dutch hero who had fooled the Nazis by selling them forgeries, accruing great wealth in return.  Van Meegeren remains one of the most ingenious art counterfeiters of the 20th century.  After his trial, however, he declared, "My triumph as a counterfeiter was my defeat as a creative artist.”

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A cocktail of suspense, art, history and theft makes the viewing highly entertaining!

Language as Syncopated Music

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              Language as Syncopated Music

A writer for whom cadences of the Hindi language and its silences are paramount to a story, not as a vehicle for recounting the tale but the story itself. “For me, language is not just the craft; language is itself the story, the statement, the action.”  This is Geetanjali Shree, whose second name is her mother’s first name, substituting ‘Pandey’, her family name.

Geetanjali is a writer and an equally proficient playwright.  A Ph.D. in history, she has written four novels – ‘Mai’, ‘Hamara Shahar Us Baras’, ‘Tirohit’ and ‘Khali Jagah’.  She has penned several short stories and a non- fiction book, ‘Between Two Worlds’ - an Intellectual biography of Premchand.  Her plays have been performed to wide acclaim at NSD and other theatre groups in India and abroad. Her books have been translated into many languages.

Geetanjali has adapted Tagore’s ‘Ghare Bhaire’ and ‘Gora’ for the stage. One of her most successful scripts is an adaptation of Hadi Ruswa’s 19^th century Urdu classic, ‘Umrao Jan Ada’, to which she gave a radical feminist reading. She has also written the script for ‘Sundari’ and adapted Lao Jiu: The Ninth Born, a Chinese play by Kao Pao Kun, into Hindi, titled ‘Navlakha.’

Her first novel ‘Mai’ depicts a mother who is bent double performing the ceaseless chores of a teeming household. A woman who is a mere shadow, gliding noiselessly around rooms, meeting the vociferous demands of her family. Her bent spine and fragile countenance hides a rock-like core, which endures and holds her up inside. The secrets that she harbours in her psychological mindscape intrigue her children, who want to dismantle the enigma of their mother and know her better. The second novel ‘Hamara Shahar Us Baras’ is set loosely after the incidents of Babri Masjid demolition.  

‘Tirohit’ her second novel translated in English as “The Roof Beneath their Feet’ means hidden. The subtle, hidden secretive lives of women repressed, controlled and monitored in Indian societies. Geetanjali says, “Also, so much is lost to the procrustean ‘male gaze’ (if I may flog the much flogged horse!) which without realizing what it is doing , keeps fitting into its habitual cognitive modes even things that are completely at variance.”  She enumerates instances in the book where two women are together, but the conditioned gaze of the viewer (even children) only synthesizes the male and the female sexual connotations between them. The calamitous confrontation with death and thereafter forms the core of her fourth book ‘Khali Jagah’.

The past is a great presence in her work. It weaves in and out of the present trajectories of her characters. She says, “If ‘Hamara Shahar Us Baras’ has a historical past, the past in ‘Mai’ is a personal memory. The past in ‘Khali Jagah’ is wild, imagined, mad past and in ‘Tirohit’, it is doing other things.”

Geetanjali is much occupied with the interior monologues of her characters, that subtle exchange of meanings and dialogue between two characters. Stream of consciousness is a pervasive element of her writing. The staccato eruptions, dissect the narrative into fragmentary prose. Linearity is not her style. On the contrary, disjointedness and going back and forth become her hallmark technique. The craft depicts life in flux, tangled in episodes, thoughts and actions. Reading between the lines through the non-linear text, the reader is engaged in an adventure of piecing together the lives of the characters.

The metaphor is central to her stories. The subtlety with which she frames and embeds the metaphor in her story, is indeed admirable. Behind each metaphor a set of stories, behind each a parable. The bent-over back of the mother in ‘Mai’ itself throws up a collage of images and texts, hitting home, cutting through our defenses as a society. The bent back says it all – subservience, stamina, low self-esteem, inconsequential and yet enduring. The round shape offers no resistance and therefore, perseverance becomes its core, which lends its strength and spirit. The extended roof in ‘Tirohit’ becomes a playfield where hidden desires acquire a life of their own. With the roof beneath their feet and the open sky above them, the women across neighboring households meet and breathe free air and sunshine dabbling in that which is taboo within the confines of their homes below.

Geetanjali is bilingual. Her eloquent Hindi and English idiom reflects a comfort zone in both languages which then becomes her strength. Her first story ‘Bel Patra’ appeared in ‘Hans’ a literary magazine (started by Premchand and later revived by Rajendra Yadav). ‘Anugoonj’ an anthology of short stories brought her recognition and the English translation of ‘Mai’ catapulted her into fame. However, her connect with Hindi language is binding, “English has given me some new access but so far it is Hindi which has got me fame. A notable contrast was the interest other languages across the world, such as German, French, Russian, Korean, Italian, Polish have shown in my work. And mind you – again I wish to underscore this – they have reached me through Hindi, not English! I have been taught in some of these languages and translated too, from Hindi, not English. My writing continues to be routed through Hindi.” She adds, “Besides I want to write a great novel measuring up as great literature. That’s success, more than being propagated geographically. I want my work to be translated into different languages and reach more and more people, but my supreme judge is literature and that is where I must measure well.”

No doubt Geetanjali’s pervasive preoccupation with human nature and feminine spaces is laudatory, but it’s her stylistic literary technique which makes her literature sui generis. Her prose is sing – song, has a rhythm and a beat to it. It adapts very well to audio readings, mesmerizing the listener with its tonality and a magnetic quality. Invariably the syncopated musical quality of her language breaks the structure, sounding trills and quadrilles, in every other line. And that’s the mark of artistic craft! Kudos!

It was a pleasure talking to Geetanjali Shree over lunch on the last day of the Goa Art Lit festival.  

The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence

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                      The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence

Faisal Devji is here in Goa for the Goa Art /Lit Festival. The acclaimed author of ‘Landscapes of the Jihad’ and ‘The Terrorist In Search of Humanity’ now presents a polemical study of Gandhi in his latest book called ‘The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence.’ Digressing from the hagiographic text, the clichéd arguments like ‘a spiritual man in a breech-clout’ or aspects of his personal life, Devji dwells on ‘missed paths and hidden possibilities’ of the lethal political thinker of the twentieth century. 

He begins the text with the provocative words of the labour activist, Kanji Dwarkadas, “Gandhiji appealed to the imagination of the world as a little, scrawny, half-starved, self-denying man, a wizened monkey defying the terrible British lion, a reincarnation of Hanuman, the monkey-god”. But Devji fleshes him out as a radical force, completely enmeshed with world politics of his times. He examines the thought behind his potent legacy of non-violence that he bequeathed to the world. He directs the attention of the reader to Gandhi’s psycho-analytic theory of transmuting or redirecting violence through the use of non-violence. He writes, “Gandhi, the active proponent of non-violence or the ‘sovereign method’, wanted not to escape violence but to tempt and convert violence by engaging with it. He thought violence and non-violence were so intimately linked that one could be transformed into the other, since evil too requires goodness to sustain itself.”  

Gandhi’s “fantastic, almost crack-brained schemes” were a series of political experiments carried out in the strife-torn soil of South Africa and colonial India - an arena seeped in conflict, injustice and violence where a moral compass could transform human energies and liberate them not only from imperialism, but render to the world, a model of freedom from violence. Therefore, his agenda was not merely nationalistic, argues Devji. He wanted to set a precedent for human force at large in the face of political-ills of his times. His principle of non-violence was a moral agency and would lead to the spiritualization of politics. “Real suffering bravely borne melts even a heart of stone. Such is the potency of suffering or tapa. And, there lies the key to Satyagraha.” 

Quoting from Gandhi’s writings, Devji clearly indicates that ‘Bhagawad Gita’ was a way of life for Gandhi.  He steadfastly emulated the teachings in his own life and then fed it to the masses through various political non-violent protests spearheaded during the freedom struggle of India. “He was as hard-hearted as Hitler,” says Devji and would not think much about the sufferings and lives of people sacrificed in the face of non-violent fights as long as the moral remained untainted and won liberation for the larger good of man and posterity. Gandhi often said, “Have not our saints and sages taught us that one who is a worshipper of ahimsa should be softer than a flower and harder than a stone?”  Non-violent sacrificial offerings and moral acts went hand in hand against violence.

“History of suffering was preferable to one of victimization,” says Devji, of Gandhi’s thoughts and politics. If non-violent struggle was impossible, then the evil of violence was better than the glorification of victimization which Gandhi identified with cowardice. Between violence and cowardly flight, he preferred violence. He said that as long as he himself was a coward, he harboured violence and could not practice non-violence, which comes with deliberate conscious effort and thought. He also believed that a human being was a fragile animal but when doors were opened and a path stared you in the face, then strength of word and action came from God who directs you in such times. “Never have I attributed my independent strength to myself,” said Gandhi.

Devji explores the smorgasbord of Gandhi’s political experiments ranging between his early belief in the British Empire, the Pan-Islamic call for upholding the Caliphate, letters to Hitler, advice to the Jews and finally imploring the British to leave India to anarchy and civil war. The chapter titled ‘Bastard History’ situates his political experience and grooming more as a product of western influences from Europe, South Africa and Russia, somuchso that the ‘Gita’ that was to be his guiding light came to him in England through an English translation. His concept of nationality was based on the needs of the minority, for he felt that truth gets corrupted in the hands of the majority (the basic premise because of which he was assassinated).  Gandhi’s policy of non-cooperation, Swadeshi goods and working of a moral relationship between Hindus and Muslims is positioned in the narrative of the warfare and the Mutiny of 1857.

Devji outlines how the Mutiny provided a basis for Hindus and Muslims to understand each other’s faith and beliefs of purity and pollution and unite to oppose the British hegemony that was maligning their caste and religious sentiments. This brotherhood was appropriated by Gandhi when he established ashrams where each Indian followed his own religion and marriage alliances, yet they lived together and waged the non-violent movement under his aegis. 

It further led him to support the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate and the Pan-Islamic call of Muslims worldwide and in India.

Gandhi called the Jews ‘The Untouchables of Christianity’ and through his letters sent them a clarion call for sovereign movement of non-violence in the face of every atrocity by the Nazis. If they had died as protestors rather than victims, maybe the holocaust may not have become such a dark inerasable line in the history of mankind. He also implored them not to take on Palestine under the protection of British bayonets and to seek a settlement with the Arabs. Lastly, the final political undoing that Devji highlights is Gandhi’s call in 1946 to the British to leave India to anarchy and civil war. That partition was imperative was clear but Gandhi argued that if the Indians were left to sort out their own differences, there was still hope of brotherhood between Hindus and Muslims. “If the British were not here, we would still go through the fire, no doubt, but the fire would purify us.” 

After independence, he was apalled when the army was called out in the Kashmir agitation.  He wanted the non-violent cult to continue unabated whenever violent strife raised its ugly head.

Finally, Gandhi upheld that the right to live stems from a duty to be a citizen of the world. Devji highlights the paradox of life and death that Gandhi had clarified in his late writings: “The great importance that western medicine attached to human life, prolonging its earthly existence by drugging/injecting only to lose it carelessly in numbers on battlefields. Only by giving up the thirst for life, the excessive desire to live that was represented in modern war and western medicine alike, could the urge to kill be tamed, and the art of throwing away my life for a noble cause be mastered”.

The book presents an intensive read and the reader must be prepared to devote time and energy to follow Devji’s argument of Gandhi’s impossible feat as a human being. The juxtaposition of Gandhi’s own writings and thoughts continuously alternate with his own expositions in the book and engage readers all through the text.   

We have to give it to Devji; he has very successfully rendered to us the Mahatma as a ‘philosophical anarchist’. He not only cut the cord between the state and the sovereign, but also showed that freedom and sovereignty was every citizen’s natural possession as long as one was fearless to suffer by withdrawing one’s cooperation (non-violently) from an unjust order.

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Landeg White: The Global Poet

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                                                        Landeg White: The Global Poet

In the cool confines of a room on the upper storey of Fundacao Oriente, I met Landeg White. A citizen of the world, he has taught in three continents and turned out a prodigious number of books of prose and poetry. He is in Goa presently to talk to audiences about his work and preoccupations of the last 50 years. Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

Let’s begin with your translation and concerns about Portugal’s legendary poet Luis de Camões and his epic poem ‘The Lusiad’  

My first encounter with Camões was in July, 1970 in Beira, Mocambique through my wife, Alice, when I bought ‘Os Lusiadas’ and she, Jane Austen’s ‘Orgulho e Proconcerto’.  Camões was the most widely travelled of all the Renaissance poets. He travelled to East Africa when he was very young and then on to the Far East, including India and Macau. ‘The Lusiads’ is his epic account of Vasco da Gama’s pioneer voyage to India. He was loved for his lyric poems that I have translated as well. These were not known outside his home country. In my compilation ‘Translating Camões: a Personal Record’, I have recounted my concerns about ‘The Lusiad’.  Vasco da Gama, the hero of ‘The Lusiads’ was not by a long chance an epic hero but a working hero, whose voice became the voice of his nation. In retrospect, my translation has divested the poem of its imperialistic, nationalistic and colonial intention by playing down the multiple adjectives and finding alternative narratives for nouns and verbs in the poem. Along with religious sentiment, it equally conveys scientific revolution and discoveries of its times.

The book cover of your translated volume ‘The Collected Lyric Poems of Luis De Camões, depicts a colorful painting. How does it connect Camões to Goa?

Camões (1524-1580) was the first European artist to cross into the southern hemisphere and his poetry bears the mark of near two decades spent in North and East Africa, the Persian Gulf, India and Macau. From an elegy set in Morocco to a hymn written at Cape Guardafui on the northern tip of Somalia and through the modern European love poems for a non-European woman, these lyrics reflect Camões's encounters with radically unfamiliar peoples and places. I have arranged the poems to follow the order of Camões's travels, making the book read like a journey. The work of one of the first European cosmopolitans, these poems demonstrate that Camões deserves his place among the great poets. The colorful painting on the cover was, most probably, the artwork accomplished in Goa, depicting Camões in a jail cell, working on his epic poem.

Do you agree with George Monteiro’s book ‘Presence of Camões in America, English and South African poetry’? Is there evidence that Camões works inspired poets after him?

Camões influence is seen in the works of many poets of the last centuries. Elizabeth Bishop, Melville and South African poets like Prince and Campbell echo his poetics in their works.

our multicultural commitments in the Caribbean, West Africa and Portugal led to a plethora of writings rooted in the people and histories of these lands. You started with ‘V.S Naipaul: A Critical Introduction’ and followed up with twenty more books. Shed some light on your writings in ‘Studying to be Singular: John Gabriel Stedman, 1744- 1797’, and the more recent ‘Singing Bass’ and ‘Arab Work’.

My long interest in John Gabriel Stedman began with the brief account, first read in Trinidad, of 'the idyll between Stedman and his brown Joanna' in Charles Kingsley's ‘At Last’, an exuberant naturalist's description of a Christmas spent there in 1870. My book is a double biography. First of Stedman as an idiosyncratic artist and soldier (1744-1797) and second of the book he wrote about his five years' campaign in Suriname. Within the book are dozens of illustrations, including the engravings by William Blake - based on Stedman's sketches of scenes from the Suriname planter-slave society. It celebrates Stedman’s Suriname colony and his non-European dark love. My first book of poems ‘For Captain Stedman’, the title poem is dedicated to Stedman.

‘Singing Bass’ and more so ‘Arab Work’ reveals what it means to settle and age in a foreign country. The collection explores Portugal, where I have been for the last 20 years now, through the eyes of a Welsh poet.  It is a celebration of Portuguese culture.

I am wondering that if the book is about celebrating Portugal, why you titled it ‘Arab Work’?

The answer lies in one of the poems in the book. Alice was designing a water garden around our plot of land, in Mafra, Portugal, when we came across the stone trough, the square stone culvert that tunneled our plot to the arched exit. This was Arab work, a well-watered platform raised a thousand years back at the valley’s head.

Landeg finds the poem in the book and passes it to me. I read the last stanza aloud:

and my unfolding luck’s to have/purchase where the husbandry/of a millennium still holds./The olive trees are archives,/the soil clinging to my shoes/has been turned so many centuries/by tools that have kept their/shape and muscle. My sudden/ prayer is serious: to be worthy.

The impact is tremendous. I repeat the last two lines savoring each syllable.

All through your work you have hailed the oral poetry tradition of indigenous societies. Please expound on this.

Oral genres are maps of experience that open up the intellectual, emotional and moral life of societies more clearly and dramatically than any other source. Poetry becomes an investigation to understand the subtle and the obscure in cultures which would otherwise not be so easily understood. I was teaching ‘Dickens’ to my students in the African landscape when for the first time, through the open window, I heard a chorus of singing voices. Thus began a journey of understanding ethnographic history from non-literate social contexts.

Name the books that have set you free as a human being.

Derek Walcott’s first book of poems ‘In a Green Night’ and everything he wrote after that has inspired me. The pastoral rendering, with such great affection, in small villages is heartening for the soul.

Our long conversation lasted two hours, wherein the poet distilled his life and works. I got a peek- a- boo into a rich multifarious life, but the soul thirsts for more such enlightening encounters. Landeg White is here for the Goa Art Lit Fest from 8^th to 11^th Dec, 2016.