Art of Growing Old

Where the Flowers Still Grow

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=19574&date=2017-05-28&pageid=1

                                

   Postcards from Kashmir

I went to see ‘Where the Flowers Still Grow’ - a visually vocal landscape of Kashmir by Bharat Sikka, at Sunaparanta Centre for Arts. You see, I was born in Kashmir, and though i didn’t want to go, dreading what I would see, I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Yes, I found flowers in a couple of photographic templates but they were minute, on spiked stems, or had fallen  - discoloured, shrivelled and torn, carpeting the earth enmeshed with stones.

The exhibition is inspired by Mirza Waheed’s novel ‘The Collaborator’ which tells the story of a Kashmiri man struggling to understand the past and present, and the sense of self in the ensuing context.  Bharat Sikka visited Srinagar in 2013, and came upon the novel.  Thereafter, he went 3-4 times in the following years, observing, listening and recording a story in his camera.

The exhibition has an eerie feel with no cataloguing essay. Untitled frames hang silently, as if robbed of expression. There is nothing left to say.  In this situation, Bharat’s photographic canvases capture existential Kashmir, exposing remnants of the enveloping violence in the region. It’s an ode to autumn, definitely, but  devoid of any colour.

The first frame at the entrance itself introduces the visitor to the inherent inversion of Bharat’s sublime statement on the state of affairs. The eye comes to rest on the silhouette of a man attired in customary Kashmiri dress with a shawl draped around his upper frame, against a grey mist, his back turned to the viewer. Others show men silently mounted on horse backs, staring fixedly with deadpan expressions. In another, a man stands rooted in a field of spiked tree trunks, hemmed in by the pointed stalks, immovable and imprisoned. An ash-marked bloodied hand subverts portraiture, occupying centre stage in the line.  A Rembrandt shot focuses on a man’s face surrounded by darkness. He is asleep or has he shut his eyes against the light, feeling hopeless?

A deafening silence clothes the entire landscape. Besides the inhabitants, nature too stands a mute witness to the continuing carnage - tree trunks seems eaten away from inside, hollow and disintegrating - their piercing branches sans the green foliage. Conifers stand like sentinels marking the horizon. Sometimes when the grey and black uninterrupted terrain is punctured by a green hill and a waterfall, it appears more an aberration, alienated from the rot everywhere else.

A complete absence of women and children from the frames is marked and forceful, an intentional choice by the photographer. The omission drives the point hard that this is now a ruthless man’s territory - cruel and colourless, where noise of cannon roars loud with no space for sensitivity, nurturing, compassion, innocence, or any other relevant feminine construct.

The gallery space is further haunted by a melancholic musical strain which stems from an installation at the further end of the corridor. It has a Steve Reich quality to it, a persistent beating pulse superimposed by electronic music that takes the story forward. But the impetus doesn’t change anything much on the lighted screen, where thick black clouds loom, moving in pace with the music. Standing in the empty room looking at the screen, the feeling imperceptibly seeps in - the grinding noise of cannon fire in the background and darkness are here to stay. They have become parts of the landscape.

If you pause to meditate within this deprivation, the juxtapositions built by Bharat and further enhanced by curator Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi become voluble. A torn and overused yellow and red  packet of 32” S&W revolver cartridges graces a wall,  a bloodied head of a goat on curled spikes symbolically completes that picture . A dark alcove from a dilapidated house with a zero watt bulb glowing on its wall ,  looks out to frames of bright light.  These and many more pictures are contrasted with the following  - sari hanging on a clothes line in a room, a miniature heart with very hard to read minute lettering – ‘be my valentine’, a postage stamp in the corner of a blank page  with the lettering ‘27^th Pacific Area Travel Association Conference’. The larger than life size of war objects against diminishing motifs of the softer frames is self-explanatory. 

Bharat uses visual metaphors and metonymy to express his personal sightings in the valley of death. He amplifies the war rhetoric with symbols - a wooden cross with a white sack tied to it embeds   the carnage in a much larger historical context. A polished walnut Trojan Horse packs in a punch of conspiracy and betrayal. A double rainbow outlines the mouth of a devouring shark. An empty inverted maroon velvet-lined chest box, becomes a vociferous statement about looted treasure. Ubiquitous chalk-white boulders lining rivers and pathways have acquired a mosaic pattern that on a closer look reveals itself to be dried blood and excreta. A loud speaker mounted on a tripod spews out words which no one seems to hear.

The entire bricolage gives the landscape a museum-like quality, on which we gaze for hours, drawn by muted rage, its ugliness and dismembered power. The greys and blues, indicate a mood of suffering that’s intensified by the red and yellow of the raging forest fire in the background, or is it a burning pyre? Predatory birds appear and contradict the non-existent livestock.

Bharat conveys the final blow with the showcasing of postcards from Kashmir in a customary glass-cased window. Nostalgia hits hard, for instead of pictures of colourful ‘shikaras’  on Dal lake, brightly clad women in ‘phirens’, tall handsome men adorning Kashmiri topee, gardens full of gorgeous Chrysanthemums and Dahlia’s  – the postcards are a muted grey with silhouettes of grey scrawny trees lining the breath of the page. Every postcard is a replica of the one before it and they together complete the exhibit in the show window. The irony is further exacerbated by a set of colourful ribbons worn on a soldier’s uniform, with medals encoding – ‘Satyamave Jayate’ and the ‘25^th Independence Anniversary Celebration’.

That finally nails the story tier in the storyboard permanently. I can feel a heaviness pervade my senses, which isn’t going away anywhere, I know. I will be back to meditate again!

   

The Matisse Stories by AS Byatt

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=18172&date=2017-04-23&pageid=1

Did Matisse Paint Stories ?

Art is a take from life or does life take from art - is a question Byatt deliberates and then answers copiously through her work of art ‘The Matisse Stories’. She draws upon her strengths of storytelling and art to paint evocative canvases of three women, caught at a certain juncture in their lives. Henry Matisse paintings superimpose the entire frame of the book nourishing the narrative with colour, texture and form. Each story begins with a vignette of a Matisse painting, linked to the essence of the story in a subtle and yet profound way. 

Byatt’s paintbrush etches beautiful verbal sketches of her characters and situates them in a milieu of their own making. Just as in her Booker Prize winning novel ‘Possession: A Romance’, duality pulls at the heartstrings of men and women caught between values, comfort zones and situations. Should Lucian go with his girlfriend to the Greek isles or stay with his wife?  Do the two professors let anorexics, namely self-loathing Peggi Nollett obtain her doctorate on Matisse or stay the course of events? 

The veneer sparkles and shines with suffused colour and artistic word-play but the core of each story is the corrugated grey colour of pain, white emptiness of loss and shards of splintered glass.  Humdrum sequences and inconsequential happenings acquire darker tones, climaxing to an undoing, exposure or a confrontation of hidden secrets in vitrines of human souls. The conclusive note is hopeful and liberating, like the light in Matisse paintings, visiting and dispersing the darkness, that idea of comfort in an armchair.

Byatt writes that Matisse shocked people by saying that art was like an armchair. “ What I dream of,  is an art of balance, of purity, of quietness, without any disturbing subjects, without worry, which maybe, something soothing, something to calm the brain, something analogous to a good armchair which relaxes him from his bodily weariness....”

 She continues the dialogue between the two characters expounding Matisse’s quote, unravelling it through words, giving it a lucid silvery silhouette - 


“Who is it that understands pleasure, Dr. Himmelblau?  Old men like me who can just understand their bones not hurting, who remember walking up a hill with a spring in their step like the red of the Red Studio. Pleasure is life, Dr. Himmelblau, and most of us don’t have it, or not much, or mess it up, and when we see it in those blues, those roses , those oranges, that vermilion, we should fall down and worship - for it is the thing itself. Who knows a good armchair? A man who has bone cancer, or a man who has been tortured, he can recognize a good armchair....”

Susannah, a middle-aged woman, in the first story ‘Medusa’s Ankles’, had come to trust Lucian (a hairstylist) with her disintegration. She had lost the desire to be seen and to be looked at. She had been awarded as a linguist and had to appear on television.

 “The cameras searched jowl and eye-pocket, expose brush-stroke and cracks in shadow and gloss. So interesting are their revelations that words, mere words, go for nothing, fly by whilst the memory of a chipped tooth, a strayed red dot, an inappropriate hair, persists and persists”. 

She wanted Lucian to make her look young and glowing (Suzie of the past). Lucian‘s soothing and softening touch parodies Matisse’s brushwork – the hairdresser induces relaxation and reverie. But Lucian tells her that he has finally decided to leave his wife (who has let herself go, with fat swollen ankles) as he wanted beauty, a must in life. Susannah, a mature composed woman aware of her own fat ankles and loss of flush rosy skin, comes undone and smashes his saloon to pieces.  

Here Byatt paints a sensuous portrait of the battle hoarded saloon “...puddles of venous-blue and fuchsia-red unguents, scissors dancing on a hook its frenzy diminishing, uneven spasmodic falls of glass, a susurration of hairpins on paper, and odd intense spills of orange henna or cobalt and copper”.  The destruction of the old transforms and creates room for the new in life.

‘Art Work’ is about the Dennisons’, an artistic family and their potential housekeeper Mrs Brown.  A generous designer artist wife and a self-absorbed neoclassical artist husband with two children, pave way for the growing artistic sensibilities of Mrs Brown. Her instincts for shocking effects and juxtapositions of colour get fine-tuned to a different artistic creation and she surprises the family with an exhibition of her work at a gallery.  This ‘untoward event’ for the artistic family unleashes the savage energy of the husband-wife artistic pair to newer realms in their own exploits of art.

The last story is the study of the self-loathing of an anorexic woman student Peggi consumed by bodily horrors with Matisse’s nude women, the play of colour and light in his works. The visiting professor Perry Diss, who holds Matisse sacred, has been accused of sexual assault by the student. In conversation with the dean of Women’s Studies, Dr Gerda Himmelblau, the professors while trying to decide about the outcome of the charge, experiences the cathartic planes of Matisse’s art.  Tiny unbalances in their own make-up trip into place and they part on a note wishfully hoping that journeying with art, Peggy too would find a release.

Juxtaposition of art and human life is what makes this triptych of fascinating short stories a must read.

This is just to say

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=19244&date=2017-05-21&pageid=1

       ‘This is just to say’

‘This is just to say’ is William Carlos William’s most famous poem. Who can convert everyday matter such as a slip or conscious trickery in quotidian domestic life into poetry! That’s WCW for us - a man who otherwise led a contrived life, working as a full time paediatrician, on the go making house calls at all times of the day in the first half of 20^th century America. He lived in the suburbs of New Jersey.  His was a conventional life interwoven with flashes of artistic talent, leavening the humdrum to sweetness and joy.

We are struck by the precise imagery of WCW’s poems. Nouns such as plums and icebox; adjectives such as sweet, cold and delicious, and verbs such as eaten, saving and forgive, combine to etch an episodic scene in the day to day turn of married life. A slice to savour, peep voyeuristically and imagine the sexual underpinnings of marital bliss.

Overriding it is the consistent sensibility of the poet to morph the mundane into something extraordinary and overwhelming like a still life painting!

There are numerous theories about this poem (it’s the fall of Adam and Eve who ate the forbidden fruit, or about repressed sexuality or  an apology for interfering with the schedule of a housewife’s culinary plan) which itself go to make this poem profound. It’s astonishing that something so simple can invoke such varied responses and engage the reader completely. The poem also incites abundant hilarity.

The next poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ is an indelible image to think about. The varied connotation arise from the juxtaposition of colours in the poem, the image of the farm with domesticated poultry, the incurring workload, the abundance of nature, coming together of man - animal and machine, the necessity and miracle of simple machines and other endless pictures.

There is no denying the fact that WCW was an imagist poet. The concise and clear images that his lines put together are undoubtedly colourful, but realistic. The following poems are studies in this regard.

             

In these poems the subject is a fair woman. Her dilemma is loss of youth and vitality in the first poem. In the second she is coveted by a solitary man in a car (the poet) for her beauty and mystery.  The poet is well aware of the societal barriers which separate them, but cannot help the stirrings of desire for the pretty woman behind the wooden walls of her husband’s house.  What better picture of a beautiful small town romance that is never ending!

WCW sought his own idiom of poetry – free unrhymed verse and common vocabulary contrary to his contemporaries Ezra pound and TS Eliot. Their epic poems really rattled WCW, and he wanted to cut away from their formalized and stylistic tradition of writing poetry.  His own epic poem ‘Paterson’ imagines the city to be a man, and its progress with technology written in everyday American English.  

Now here is a poem that showcases his skill to reflect paintings. On a rainy night WCW came upon a noisy fire engine with the figure 5 flashing, tearing through the flooded street. The lasting impression of this encounter resulted in the poem ‘The Great Figure’. The poem was adapted into a modernist, cubist painting by his friend Charles Demuth.

WCW ‘s journey with painting also resulted in ekphrastic poems based on the works of  the Flemish painter, Pieter Brueghel, called ‘Pictures from Brueghel and other poems’. The reader can look up these poems and read them with the snapshots of paintings side by side.

What joy!  

Paterson by Jim Jarmusch

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=18930&date=2017-05-14&pageid=1

Goodbye cafes and bohemia, Hello downtown quotidian poetry!

The film ‘Paterson’, inspired by the epic eponymous poem by William Carlos Williams, introduces viewers to down town Paterson, NJ. Against this backdrop we listen to the poetry of Ron Badgett (of the New York School of poets) enunciated by the protagonist who’s also called Paterson. Writing before his shift on the bus as the driver, in the lunch break beside the Passaic Falls, or in his basement room at home, Paterson takes us through a solitude that is one with the world. It’s not poetry in a cafe or a watering hole amidst booze and brawl but in the solitariness of a man’s heart, singing a quiet song rooted in its rich dailiness.

The film is a paean to poetry, portrayed in the form of a poem that stays with us long after it is over. In the original poem, WCW imagines metaphorically speaking, the man to be the city, “Paterson lies in a valley under the Passaic Falls/its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He/lies on his right side, head under the thunder of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep /his dreams walk about the city where he persists/incognito......the subtleties of his machinations drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river.”

The film continues to grow in our thoughts long after its over. At the heart of the movie lies a rare commodity – a beautiful marriage with his wife Laura that is held together by polarity and cords of understanding like a blue porcelain piece of beautiful china.

The director Jim Jarmusch says, “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Select only things to steal that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

Jim takes his beloved poetry and philosophy to brush coat an industrial town of mixed ethnicity, similar to Walt Whitman or Allen Ginsberg. He celebrates town life, its sheer predictability, the everydayness of activity and small talk. The view of the town from a bus seat is theatrical; we are looking down into down town shops, back roads, bus depots and the intersections of lights. We pass through lanes and by lanes of small time America and its hub hub of life. The camera veers to the grand Passaic waterfalls, many a times through the film, etching poems on the cascading falls.

Jim coalesces lines of poetry from poets who lived in Paterson such as WCW, Allen Ginsberg or others whom he has admired and read widely.  Markedly most of the poets enumerated in the film led conventional lives interspersed with bursts of poetry inspired by their everyday experiences. The famous ‘Lunch Poems’ by Frank O’Hara is an example. There is a subtle hint at Emily Dickinson too, with her reclusiveness and disinclination to publish her poems, just like Paterson, a poet writing for himself to fulfil his own desire completely detached from things.

On the other hand, Paterson’s better half, Laura, harbours ambitions of becoming a country singer or owning a successful cupcake business. She is artistic and spends her time engaged in creative endeavours of cooking baking dress designing and painting. In the process her home has mushroomed into an artistic haven of color, design and gourmet recipes. She brings spice, distraction and disorder into her husband’s life that is otherwise a disciplined order of events each day. The recitation of WCW’s poem by Paterson in the film ‘This is just to say’ imparts that touch of domestic bliss, here, and completes the gilded frame.

The film is made up seven episodes or poetic stanzas starting Monday morning until the next week. The slow even pace sets in right at the beginning. Paterson wakes up with the morning sun rays streaming into their room, bathing their marital bed in a dappled light.  He kisses his wife, who shares her dream of having twins on one instance (this visual rhyme of twins repeats like a refrain through the film with Paterson encountering twins all over town), has his porridge and walks to the bus depot. He drives the bus the whole day through the town. People get in and off the bus and he listens in to their conversations. At the end of his shift he again walks home, shares a meal with Laura, talking about their day. Later he goes to his basement room and writes and reads poems before walking his dog Marvin, an English bulldog to a bar where he meets the bar owner - Doc and a couple of other regulars such as Marie and Everret. The entire sequence is repeated everyday with few variations.

The interlude of Paterson with the same characters lends gravitas to his persona. He is laconic, contained, peaceful and detached. Laura is verbose, dreamy, ebullient and a people’s person. His co-worker Donny is a constant complaint box and the bar owner is a traditionalist whose bar has a wall of fame where he celebrates the famous people of Paterson- providing a historical context to the place. The other couple in the bar – Marie and Everret bring in the drama – a relationship which is effervescent and dramatic.   Everret’s panache for histrionics and drama is a contrast to Paterson’s practicality and reserve.

Laura envisions a great poet in her husband and keeps cajoling him to print his poems and share them with the world. When finally she extracts a promise from the very reluctant and reserved Paterson to xerox his secret notebook at the end of the week , the director folds in a Freudian slip which makes Paterson leave his notebook on the living room sofa. Marvin plays truant and shreds Paterson’s secret poetry notebook when the couple go out to watch a film.

Paterson ends with, “Poems are just words on water” – it’s the magic and sheer delight of writing poems that’s important, what happens to them later is of no consequence. He meets a Japanese poet on a bench under the Passaic Falls, who gifts him a notebook to begin writing poems again and so the love affair with life and poetry begins anew!

Rushdian Matters

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=20114&date=2017-06-11&pageid=1

Rushdian Matters

Do you know why the characters in Salman Rushdie’s novels are monstrous, handicapped, grotesque and sometimes lovely bastards?  It’s because his stories are dealing with issues of identity crisis in an environment of multiculturalism, post-colonialism hybridity, multiplicity, dogmatic power of religions and economic disfiguration.

Another interesting paradox is that he himself straddles a multicultural space – born in India in the post-colonial period and living in the West, drawing from both Eastern and Western cultural traditions.

Thirdly, his agency of depiction is pretty intriguing. He uses magic realism (interplay of fact & fantasy) and chutnification of language to traverse this field of ambiguity. Allusions are drawn with ease, on one hand from classical literature and the other from pop culture. He surprises and disorients the reader with his abandonment and disregard for established code.

Welcome to Rushdian matters.

In conversation with Prema Rocha, professor of English Literature at St. Xavier’s Mapusa and writer of a book on literary criticism of Salman Rushdie’s works.

I would like you to elaborate on the title of your book ‘Shaping the World, Stopping it from Going to Sleep: The Novels of Salman Rushdie’.

Salman Rushdie is generally considered a remarkable contemporary writer. He addresses concerns that are pivotal to our times, like identity, tyranny and terrorism. He believes that writers who are apolitical offer their vote for the way things are. That his books have been mired in controversy has not deterred him from the compulsion to be politically expressive. And indeed, in his own work he takes sides, starts arguments, shapes the world and keeps it alert. The title is a quote from Rushdie, “A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep”.

 What are the overall themes that prevail in Rushdie’s oeuvre? Name the novels that you have critically analysed in your book.

 Midnight’s Children is concerned with the newly independent India trying to find itself and assert its own identity. This new nation is grappling with religious, social, economic, political and linguistic concerns like the protagonist Saleem Sinai. Shame deals with politics in Pakistan. The Ground Beneath Her Feet explores issues like migration, corruption in India and pop music through a love story. The Moor’s Last Sigh juxtaposes multicultural Spain with a Bombay that is getting increasingly communal. Fury is Rushdie’s first novel set in America. It deals with migration, politics and art. Shalimar the Clown zooms in on Kashmir. It critiques communalism and terrorism. Rushdie’s targets include totalitarianism and oppression in its various avatars. His fiction largely narrates the Indian subcontinent in the 20^th century and its association with the world beyond.

How does myth, classical literature, popular culture and films interweave Rushdie’s novels? Give a prominent example from one of his books.

Rushdie is credited with carving out a space for the Indo-English imagination on the global map with Midnight’s Children. The book was a landmark. It inspired an entire generation of creative writers and forged new directions. A significant part of the galvanising energy of Rushdie’s texts is contributed by the inter-texts. Allusions to cinema, myth, epic, fable, fairytale, gossip, proverbs, superstition, popular songs and films, comics, advertisements as well as his own other work are integrated on his canvas. Rushdie’s love for Bombay cinema finds expression in Midnight’s Children. The motif of switched babies forms the basic plot of the text. So also, the pattern of amnesia from a blow to the head. These are typically formulaic fare in Hindi cinema. 

_{You have devoted a chapter each on Rushdie’s linguistic ebullience and English writing in India – tell us a little about it.}

_{Midnight’s Children put Rushdie on the map and Rushdie put Indian Writing in English on the global map like never before. This literary renaissance has been acknowledged by writers, somuchso that most of the writers of the present day are considered “Midnight’s Grandchildren”.  Shashi Tharoor pays Rushdie tribute when he calls him the “head of my profession”. In Indian writing in English, Rushdie is hailed for his “chutneyfication”. Unlike writers who avoided writing in English, in order to write in their native languages, Rushdie embraced English as yet another Indian language. Rushdie’s Angrezi boldly reworks English as a language of India. He taps into Indian English speech and story-telling techniques. He defamiliarizes English by bringing India into English as a strategy. For example, Hindi expression are literally translated as in “whatsitsname, or “madman from somewhere”.  And he defiantly and strategically doesn’t provide a glossary to this hybrid Indlish.}

_{You say that Rushdie’s non-fiction work forms a manifesto for his fictional writing.  How?}

_{That’s right. Rushdie has a significant number of articles and interviews. His non-fictional essays are a wonderful read. They range from musings on his own experiences, other writers, world issues, and much more. These essays provide valuable insights to the understanding of his fiction.}

How did the transformation from one kind of unpublished manuscript into another, that is, from an unpublished Ph.D. thesis into an as-yet-unpublished book manuscript take place?

I guess it really helps to have a good publisher.  All credit goes to the team. Publishing house Goa1556 did an excellent job. The affable Frederick Noronha is a one-man army when it comes to publishing in Goa. His concerted efforts have changed the publishing scape in our state.  Goa 1556 took care of everything when it came to technicalities, including the creative sketch for the book by Bina Nayak. The project is also associated with Golden Heart Emporium. I am grateful to the Directorate of Art and Culture for the scheme for Goan authors which supported the book. I consider it an honour to have Padma Shri awardee, author and educationist, Dr Maria Aurora Couto write the foreword to the book. She was one of the first critics to engage with Midnight’s Children way back in 1981.

It’s hard to pick up a dissertation and hear its author’s voice. Most of the time the author is quoting from other greats – critics, authors. Revising a dissertation is partly a matter of making the writer’s text speak up. Explain the process.

 It was Issac Newton who is credited with the statement, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. Research, after all, builds upon previous research. It is imperative that one takes into account the body of existing work. Having said that, one has to keep one’s argument in focus and let one’s own voice and view be heard.

A wise dissertation director once counselled a doctoral student that the dissertation would be the last piece of his student writing, not his first professional work. Every editor at a scholarly publishing house knows this, too. How did you negotiate around this field?

That is so true! Research teaches you humility, among other things. Knowledge is expanding exponentially. In addition, the internet has changed everything. Prof K.S. Bhat, my Ph.D. supervisor and Professors Nina Calderia, Kiran Budkuley and Rafael Fernandes, my teachers at the Goa University provided valuable insights and timely suggestions. They did remind me that the completion of the Ph.D. marks the beginning of the journey. I realise now what they meant. And I try to keep writing!

 Speak about the targeted readership that will benefit from your scholarly book. 

 Being an academic endeavour, the book is aimed at a very specific readership viz teachers and students of Rushdie, those interested in Post Colonialism, Diaspora Studies, Indian Writing in English. I am happy to receive feedback from students who say the book has been of assistance to them. It also pleasantly surprises me when unexpected people stop to say they have seen the book at the wonderful Central Library or elsewhere.

There are very few who have the ability and courage to take on ‘Satan Rushdy’.  Prema Rocha is one of them. 

The Salt of the Earth by Jayanti Naik

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/mainpage.aspx?pdate=2017-05-07

                                                          The Salt of the Earth

May Day, the day that inspires hope in workers and fear in capitalists, was marked with usual rallies and processions this year. A demand for 8 hours of work, 8 hours of recreation and 8 hours of rest for labourers was the hallmark of labour movements beginning 1866 and became official on 01 May 1890. The flag bearers of the movement - Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht worked tirelessly to expose the skewed superstructure of capitalist economic models and demanded rights for workers.  Better working and living conditions and the right to leisure and education were the rallying slogans of these revolutionaries.

Against this backdrop, through the month, I kept myself engaged with the book ‘The Salt of the Earth’ by Konkani writer, Jayanti Naik. Rightly given the epithet of  ‘writer who roars (Garjan)’ by Manohararaya Saradesaya,  she takes up cudgels for the ‘Bahujan’ - the majority in Goa that represent Hindu/Christian lower castes such as toddy tappers, weavers, tribals, fishermen, midwives, rustic singers, medicine men and labourers. She found them to be storehouses of ancient tradition and culture. Closely associating with them, she learnt to tap their repositories of knowledge for her writings.

Born in the village of Amona in Quepem,  Jayanti is a Sahitya Akademi awardee  and a doctorate in Konkani language. Besides being a folklore researcher, her active participation in the Konkani language agitation of the 80s makes her a ‘keeper of memories’ - of the language, its people and the traditional/cultural heritage of this land. She has written more than 32 books, building a ‘Smriti Mandir’ - the reservoir of ancient knowledge of Goa.

‘The Salt of the Earth’ has been translated from Konkani into English by Augusto Pinto, whose creative efforts through translation chronicle the attempt to break barriers and build bridges of understanding between alien cultures . The afterword ‘The Bahujan Writes Back’ is a reader’s delight, where Augusto morphs into a literary critic as he unravels the annotated text of the book. The birth of the Bahujan in post-liberation Goa is touched upon, along with other major themes of the author’s works. This context sheds light on the directions the stories take and illustrates the ancient cultural strands of the community. Augusto also familiarizes the reader with the personal and professional life of the author, delineating the influences which shaped her social work and writings. Through his critical appraisal, Augusto identifies himself with another class of artists, one which I have often highlighted through my works, that of the ‘critic as an artist’.

The protagonist of the stories in the book is the eponymous salt of the earth - the worker who tills, sows and harvests the produce of the rivers and the land.  The author celebrates the cultural practices and customs of these people, when urbanization and alternative economic models were shifting the contours of the Goan society. She delineates the upheavals in family and community structures from feudal systems to capitalist bases, not sparing the darker strains of caste, power structure, illiteracy and gender that perpetuated the social milieu at that time.

Jayanti succeeds in her agenda of breaking through the stereotypical image of Goans as westernized Catholic people, living amidst ubiquitous whitewashed churches.  The stories make an incisive cut into the veneer of supremacy of so-called ‘Portuguese Goa’.  Her stories introduce readers to village communities rooted in an Indian ethos of temples, deities, rituals and traditions. The beliefs and customs of her characters can be traced back to age-old Hindu philosophy and cosmology. She retains the vernacular dialect in certain stories (as illustrated in notes by the translator) through works such as ‘Basvo’. She also paints the canvas of ritualistic practices of the ‘Thakar clan’ with an element of inclusiveness and understanding. There is no suggestion of othering or voyeuristic inclination of study of tribals under a lens. A classy act of subversive writing undertaken with keen sensitivity and empathy, Jayanti disrupts many myths about the Goan majority.  In the end, the subaltern comes into his own and stands tall in the mind of the reader - naked, proud and resplendent in his history, heritage, language and culture.

There is no denying that Jayanti is defensive in her stance to uphold the traditional heritage of worker clans (and this is evidenced from Augusto’s remarks too). Nevertheless, she leaves her stories open ended, suggestive of the fact that she is subtly imbuing her story paintings with colours that can bring change for the better. ‘The Fulfilment of a Desire’ and ‘Curse of a Vozhryo’ are psychological recounts of characters whose lives are living hells, holding on to societal beliefs and religious rituals embedded in their psyche. ‘Biyantul’, ‘Ramaa’ and ‘An Account of Her Life’ etch feminine sketches of unfulfilled desire and sexuality. A proclaimed harbinger of women rights in the Konkani belt, Jayanti goes all out to interweave elements of the feminine mystique in her writings to drive home the humanist lacunae in this sphere.

In Jayanti’s stories, folklore impregnates the storyline in a pronounced manner, very much like the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison that introduced the world to the sights, smells and music of marginalized black communities. Contemporary writings of Anita Heiss do the same for the Australian aboriginals (Tiddas),  as do works by Mamang Dai for tribals in Arunachal Pradesh. Jayanti’s clearly assertive yet empathetic stance also brings to mind Hansada Sowvendra Shekhar’s novels where the Jharkhand tribal strikes back clearly and irrevocably. An explicit indication of this goal could be Jayanti’s story ‘The Victory’ where the protagonist’s ire against caste oppression of tribals lands him defenceless and drives him to irrepressible wrath against God.

Jayanti’s effort to showcase power equations that reduce tribals to penury is never confrontational. At this juncture, Augusto’s writing lifts the veil and exposes the underlying power play. The reader is made privy to layers of casteism that make conditions tragic for these communities. Besides the darkness, however, the richness of myths and customs comes across to be pondered and meditated upon.

Nevertheless, the work of a translator and a literary critic, embroiled in dialectics of ‘loss in translation’, has yet to be acknowledged by the literary world at par with authorship. Although Augusto’s name appears on the cover of the book, there is no piece on him at the end of the book detailing his credibility and resume. The foreword and afterword sections are classic literary devices that can add a world of wealth to a book. The ability of a critic to read between the lines, analyse and synthesize a text is special. In a divided world, translators and literary critics play the important role of bringing forth the other side of the argument. Dialectics between diverse coteries can set up a dialogue for peace and understanding. Ludwig Wittgenstein said it well for all humanity, “The limits of my language means the limits of my world”.

he illuminations in the book leave us with an alternative perspective of the masses of Goa and a consciousness of the misshapen societal norm responsible for its tragic state of affairs. It’s a long road to freedom, but hope lies in the cultural creative such as Jayanti Naik. More power to her and her efforts!