All Hail Shakespeare

Shakespeare recently celebrated his 400th birthday, or rather the world celebrated him.  My article on Shakespeare in Navhind Times.

Faisal Devji's The Impossible Indian

    http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/mainpage.aspx?pdate=2016-04-10                  

The Impossible Indian:  Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence

Faisal Devji, the author of two acclaimed books ‘Landscapes of the Jihad’ and ‘The Terrorist In Search of Humanity’ presents a polemical scholarly study of Gandhi, not the Mahatma, in his latest ‘The Impossible Indian’.  Digressing from a hagiographic text, the clichéd arguments of 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 ‘nonviolence’ that he bequeathed to the world of men and politics. He directs the attention of the reader to Gandhi’s psychoanalytic theory of transmuting or redirecting violence through the use of nonviolence. He writes, “Gandhi, the active proponent of nonviolence or the ‘sovereign method’, wanted not to escape violence but to tempt and convert violence by engaging with it. He thought violence and nonviolence 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 nonviolence 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 - a treatise on ethics.  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’ 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 proffered 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 beginning with his belief in the British Empire, the Pan-Islamic call for upholding the Caliphate, letters to Hitler and  advice to the Jews and lastly 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, so much so 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 where Hindus and Muslims understood each other’s faith and beliefs, of purity and pollution (adhering to caste lines and rituals) and yet stood unified as one opposing the British hegemony of 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, a 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 Hitler and 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, but 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 aghast when army was called out in the Kashmir (India) 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 reader must be prepared to devote time and energy to an intensive read of the book a couple of times, to be able to follow Devji’s cogent argument of Gandhi’s impossible feat as a human being, in the quagmire of the warring forces of violence and nonviolence, as they are unleashed and comprehended in the arena of human politics. The juxtaposition of Gandhi’s own writings and thoughts continuously alternate with his own expositions in the book, compulsively engaging the reader all through the text.   

We have to give it to Devji; he has very successfully rendered to us the Mahatma as a ‘philosophical anarchist’. The latter not only cut the cord between state and sovereignty, but showed that freedom and sovereignty was every citizen’s natural possession; if one was fearless to suffer by withdrawing one’s cooperation (non-violently) from an unjust order.http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/mainpage.aspx?pdate=2016-04-10 

Tiddas by Anita Heiss

Tiddas by Anita Heiss

You cannot help but pick up the book ‘Tiddas’ authored by Anita Heiss. The spray of big blue jacarandas on a white cover of a bigger –than-usual-size novel, makes it impossible to miss.  Besides the attractive cover, the title intrigues the reader and you would like to know what it means. Tiddas is an Australian aboriginal word which means sisters.  The story is about five best friends who have grown up together and are now approaching midlife. They know each other inside out and have stood together through thick and thin. There comes a point in their lives where each one harbours a deep secret inside her.  When one day the pandora’s box opens, they become privy to hidden stories that they haven’t told one another –“ indeed the truth is the hardest to share.”

Izzy , soon to be the first black woman in New South Wales to host her own TV show , is shocked to find out that she is pregnant and has to choose between her media career and her baby.  On the other hand,  Xanthe has been desperately trying to conceive since years.  In spite of a good marriage,  she feels incomplete, because motherhood is the ultimate achievement for  Koori women of the Wiragjuri  community in Australia.  Veronica, the diehard wife and mother, has been served divorce papers. Her three precious sons have all grown up and gone into the world.  She is lonely and floundering to find meaning in life beyond being a homemaker.  Ellen, the spinster and community worker enjoys being single and free.  She is visited by love and is in turmoil, needing advice how best to handle her emotions.  And lastly, Nadine the successful white woman writer, is out of grips with herself, grappling with alcoholism and mood swings (onset of menopause) she can hardly contain within. 

Izzy and Nadine are not just friends but are related.  Izzy’s brother Richards is married to Nadine. The marriage is cozy and intimate, wherein Richard is the home maker, a reversal of roles for a man of the Wiradjuri community.  He is frowned upon by the Murri women (Aborgines in Queensland) in Brisbane where they live close to the countryside and back home by his Koori mother and elderly aunts.  Moreover, with Nadine’s  uncharacteristic rude behaviour, there is uneasiness between friends and family groups.  But the strength of the book is the unconditional bond between Richard and Nadine overriding distinctions of colour, class and race.      

Besides jacarandas lining the river and the town of Brisbane and appearing every now and then in the course of the book, Queensland’s cultural precincts too find a mention in the novel through the activities of the five women.  From the town and city, readers are taken to the aboriginal countryside for community festivals and family funerals. The rituals and practices of the Wiradjuri people to which Ellen, Xanthe and Izzy belong have been dwelt upon in detail by the author. The aboriginal community centre and the myriad activities keep the reader abreast of the indigenous flavour of the communities of Australia.

And just like the Jacarandas appear in different colours, so do the many aboriginal tribes and people through the novel, bound by common threads of humanness.  It could also be a metaphor for the five women cutting across colour wars, the black and white deadly tiddas; distinct in mood and mannerism but tied together by strong unbreakable cords of love and friendship.  The one line epigraph, a quote by Virginia Woolf, “Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends” shines a torch on the theme of the novel beautifully.  The book’s dedication adds to it - “to my tiddas for lifting me from life’s moments of darkness into the light again.”

Another very interesting feature of the novel is the book club that rocking tiddas are a part of and they call themselves ‘Vixens’, an acronym for their names.  Book tours, launches and literary agents complete the score in the social celebrity lifestyle of the character of Nadine.  The book activity becomes a strategic stylistic prop used by the author to have multiple meetings of the friends where the action in the novel then plays out. Through this situational group activity, the author very smartly highlights the classical and contemporary literature of Australia. The novels under discussion through the book at various points are:  Legacy by Larrissa Behrendt, The old School by PM Newton, The Boundary by Nicole Watson, My Husband’s Lovers by Susan Johnson, The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper .........

The author folds in a lot of religious ritualistic information through the character of Ellen. Otherwise a free woman, she is a funeral celebrant i.e. she conducts the funeral services of the close-knit Koori ethnic group and supports them during the hours of crisis by giving a honourable rite of passage to the dead members of the community.  This brings in a lot of traditional ritualistic information to the reader.  An unusual vocation for a woman, its inclusion lends a realistic edge to the novel on life and kinship.

Dr Anita Heiss is a writer, activist and a proud member of the Wiradjuri nation of central NSW.  To know more about her you can watch her at the 2013 presentation at TEDxBrisbane.

Lecture Series at Demphe College of Arts

                                                     Demphe College of Arts 

                          A   Week's  Lecture Series on the novel  "Inheritance of loss" by Kiran Desai


                             Explored themes of Immigration, alienation and displacement 

                                       through a power point and readings & discussion  

Book Review - Sleeping On Jupiter

Sleeping On Jupiter by Anuradha Roy

 Sleeping on Jupiter by  Anuradha Roy

“Spotlight” garnered the best picture and best original screenplay award at the Oscars.  And rightly so, mainly for its content.  It portrays case stories followed by investigative journalist team of The Boston Globe, ‘Spotlight’, into the child sex-abuse by Roman Catholic priests.  In a similar vein, Anuradha Roy’s ‘Sleeping on Jupiter’ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015, and it won the DSC prize for literature this year. The author delineates a predatory account of the Spiritual Gurus in ashrams in temple towns of India. Sexual energy is forceful, demonic and all consuming.  It overrides other human qualities of virtue, aesthetics, compassion and empathy.

The story is told in first person by Nomi and by an omniscient narrator who between them, bring alive a whole set of characters and a temple town Jarmuli near the sea.  Nomita Frederiksen is an assistant documentary film maker who has decided to come to Jarmuli to unearth nightmarish dreams which prey on her at night.  She is in search of her mother who had abandoned her to the boat people near the open sea as a little girl and an ashram with its charismatic Guru who had visited horror and cruelty on her and her orphaned girlfriends in the name of security and love.

 Interwoven into the fictionalized fabric are the fleshed out portrayals of three conventional old women – Gauri, Latika and Vidya , who are on a holiday to Jarmuli and are grappling with their conservative lifestyles and cultural ethos. Pulled in both directions, they do entertain thoughts of freedom and escape from the shackles of traditional beliefs and customs. On the other hand, Badal, their temple guide struggles with his feelings of same-sex love with Raghu.  Teaming with Nomi, Suraj, the photographer, has his own demons to decipher and contend with.

Johnny Toppo, the tea stall man on the beach, is the Wise man in the story who has come to terms with good and evil in life and sings while at work. He refuses to be drawn into the darkness of past and memory, a space that Nomi at 25 years of age still desperately struggles with.  She wants concrete answers which the mysteries of life do not allow her.  Interspersed with her present endeavours at Jarmuli, she reconstructs the ashram of the past with dark colours and demonic characters perpetuating cruel deeds on innocent minds.

The author also juxtaposes violence and misogyny with the pursuit of sexual fulfilment.  Insatiate desires or denial lead the men to heap abuses and physical punishment on their women and children. A history rich in erotic paintings and sculptures in temples perpetuates child abuse and suppresses sexual drives of women.  A society which sanctions man and his desires stands in staunch denial when it comes to the question of women and their right to be as they are.

Anuradha paints stark and strong imagery in her writing. “Everyone said Guruji was God. Now she knew they were right. She stayed awake for most of the night with the fruit next to her pillow. She did not know when she fell asleep. In the morning, the fruit’s pulp was like blood on her sheets. Dark red.”  Visceral feelings surface with deft stokes of color.  “She patted the camel’s side and said,’Go! Run!Far! You’re free now!’ The camel didn’t move. It hung its head looking too weary to take another step. The girl pushed the camel, ‘Shoo, go ....before they come back. It’s your life.’  The camel stood its ground. It had never heard these words before, nor the tone of voice. Then it took one tentative step to the left, and then another. Above her, the sky is opal.”

The author also contrasts backgrounds of characters and their ultimate leanings.  Nomi, in spite of her traumatizing past and ghosts in her psyche, strives for sanity– unraveling and groping through her darkness.  Suraj, on the other hand, who comes from a middle class Indian family, the boy with a beautiful face “Suraj in the Sun” has a broken marriage behind me.  Dopey-eyed and degenerate, he meets his nemesis in the end – forever engulfed in the darkness of the waves and Nomi rides the waves to a better future in the north – Norway where her foster family lives.  Fate plays its own tune irrespective of earthly contexts.

Humor enters the book through the three women and their doings during their stay at Jarmuli. “ Every year that passed seemed to make Gouri more plump. Her limbs were spindly, but her torso was a mound, a pumpkin perched on matchsticks. It was a small miracle she didn’t topple. Then she noticed a man selling tea in clay cups. She could not remember when she had last had tea smelling of rain. She told herself she would get at least three cups right away, to make up ; she was certain she wanted to drink three cups.”

But the overriding factor that holds the reader is the searing lyrical prose through which the author successfully unmasks the hidden face of Indian spirituality, the treacherous hypocrisy of sexual abuse in India. Where women still fast for the lives of their husbands, but are exploited by men even before they reach puberty. Spiritualism and religion demands sacrifices from women, they are here to give pleasure, or the only other way they can survive is as Goddesses, the earthly incarnate being the ever sacrificing motherly women. The story also provides them another alternative – of an escape to the west to be able to live a more humanly normal life.

“And that is why we read fiction at all”  

Fiction to Films

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=6888&date=2016-03-06&pageid=1

                                                            Fiction to Films

One of the activities in my book-reading sessions is comparative study of the book and the film, if the piece of literature has been adapted into a movie.  A book once read cannot be disregarded altogether.  Even if it has triggered and evoked a strong contrarian reaction, it lingers on and is reflected upon, analysed, criticized and then maybe adapted into a film. Watching a film version of your favourite book is in a manner interesting – the process of visualization of that which existed in words and was imagined in multiple ways.  What the filmmaker left out or rather enhanced, how much did the story or visuals deviate or was followed ditto, using the same dialogue and vocabulary, as the book.

The Oscars 2016 still fresh in our minds had nine movie nominations which were adapted or inspired by books. Out of these, five were shortlisted as adapted screenplays viz. Carol, The Big Short Story, The Martian, Room and Brooklyn. The others include Steve Jobs inspired by the biography written by Walter Issacson, The Revenant by Michael Punke and the Danish Girl with Eddie Redmayne, based on the novel by David Ebershoff. The Embrace of the Serpent, a Columbian film shortlisted in the Foreign Language Film category( we watched it at IFFI) was based on handwritten diaries by two scientists –Theodore Koch Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes who spent 40 years working with tribals and Shamans, absorbed in their fieldwork along the river Amazon searching for a sacred  healing plant. 

Carol is based on a novel ‘The Price of Salt’ written by Patricia Highsmith in the 50s. The writer known for her psychological thrillers had more than two dozen film adaptations of her books. ‘Strangers on a Train’ written in 1950 enjoyed a mediocre success in the publishing world. It was only when the undisputed master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock adapted it into a film that it was noticed and became a success. ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ is another much known film based on one of her 22 novels in the Tom Ripley series.  It is interesting to note how the film showed sly Ripley (young Matt Damon) meeting his nemesis in the end whereas the book lets him go scot free.

The ‘Room’ written by Emma Donoghue was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2010, and it won many other international awards, too. The story is relayed by a five year old boy Jack (Jacob Tremblay in the film,who appeared on the Oscars night at Dolby’s attired in a tuxedo)  held captive in a small room along with his mother. The experience is based somewhat on the hearing in 2008 of the Fritzi Case in a small town in Austria. Brie Larson, who played the part of the mother and the kidnapped victim, won the Oscar for the Best Actress this year.

Jack refers to the 100 sq ft area as The Room - another living being.  Emma capitalizes significant nouns used by the boy in the book (Rug, Bed, Wall) to emphasize his world made up of immense possibilities contrary to the restrictiveness and claustrophobia of the confined room and a traumatized mother. The triumph of the book is the voice of the five year old, an engaging pervasive sound that anchors the reader and artistically liberates the otherwise numbing story.

Colm Toibin, the Irish writer of the fame of ‘The Testament of Mary’, talks of his marvellous experience of seeing his book come alive on screen.  He says that he has watched the film six times and is very surprised and bemused by the transformation of this small idea he had in a delicate space in his mind; an idea which could have just been a novella but acquired a life of its own and went from being a book to a solid movie. The very morphing of the visuals on screen (He denies having played any part in the screenplay except a couple of appearances on the sets) took him on a different journey with his own book; an interesting intriguing feel to the whole phenomenon.

Books and films have existed together for more than a century now and have entered into a symbiotic relationship of ideas and forms. Creativity stems from books and filmwallahs are inspired to make frames of the storyline of a book and project it visually in motion pictures. It is like affirming and coalescing the imagination when reading the book and saying, “This is how it would appear in real life”.

Proponents of books swear by the writings of the authors and want to be left to their flights of imagination, rather than concretizing them to black and white details as shown in films. Others sit glued to visual screens, as it saves them time and effort of reading print. The sparring factions will continue on both sides, but Colm’s take on the book – film adaptation story- brings a fresh perspective to the entire process.

A film adaptation can be as pleasurable as reading or writing a book. The loud iteration of an avid reader – ‘A book is always better than its film’ or ‘Film spoils the book for its readers’ –becomes feeble and loses force when seen in this light.  Going by Colm’s ‘bemused’ utterances, the two genres entwine and enrich each other and can aspire to reach the same heights, making it a fabulous wholesome experience for the reader, who can enjoy it equally or more so in two different ways.

The jury rests here!

Teacher's Training Workshop

                                Teacher's Training Workshop 

            Developing Reading Skills in students 
                  at the secondary school level 

                  Nirmala Institute of Education Goa 

                                                            18th Jan, 2016