THE GATHERING STORM

THE  GATHERING  STORM

Writers of India have united in protests and over a hundred writers and thinkers have marched on the streets of Delhi.  What they have demanded is the obviation of any intimidation of free artistic formulation and an unchained freedom for the artist. Murder is not a response to the penning of #dissent or expression of a differing opinion.

We should be pleased with this spontaneous reaction of an otherwise passive community like artists who prefer to have their opinions expressed through their talents in artistic reflection. Taking to the streets is alien to their nature and being compelled to do this speaks of the provocation that has driven them to this pass. When aggregated across the various languages writers and their fans do form a substantial constituency.  To the politicians who seek mass followings of any kind (even of the multitudes of devotees of God-men and Babas) this must seem a considerable challenge. They can ignore it only at their peril and so they try to meet it in the only way they know – the way of the street - organising a counter challenge of wiling collaborators in public and the not so cleverly concealed intimidation in private.

Now we have a gaggle of scientists from various laboratories including the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research protesting the imposition of policy by ideologues with no great achievements in science upon their Institutions.  This is also of a piece with the long drawn protest of students of The Film and Television Institute of India who contest the appointment of a pedestrian film actor to the high position of Director of the Institute. Again we find practitioners of the visual arts and performing arts taking part in the protests.  Today a clutch of filmmakers have also returned the very prestigious awards.  Protests have also filtered down to students who were being ridden roughshod on the non-NET scholarships and who marched against the UGC.

What do these disparate groups have in common?  Why have they called it a ‘collective onslaught on reason’? The ‘perverse consistency’ of the BJP would make it respond uniformly to all of these with a single answer stating that they are all Modi-haters. An otherwise sober Finance Minister has now called them  "rabid anti-BJP elements." Unable to distinguish shades of gray and accustomed to only the black and white of obsequiousness or hate they have to lump all varieties of opposition into one corral and then proceed to attack them more with emotion than with reason curiously labelling it as #intolerance..

But the protestors must see hope in the recent past.  Language, Literature, Art, and the very many other soft arts and sciences have an overwhelming power beyond their silent strength.   It was the Bengali language and its promoters that crystallised the birth of Bangladesh; it was language and the denial of status to Tamil that gave rise to the deadly LTTE and a prolonged crisis in Sri Lanka; it was the fraternity of lawyers that toppled the military dictator Musharraf in Pakistan. What will take place in India when the various trickles of dissent and discontent growing across this vast land combine to form a mighty overpowering wave?   That will be the gathering storm against which the gossamer umbrella of the Parivar will be no protection.

The flood of returned awards

Prestigous  awards are milestones in an artist's life and one does not lightly decide on returning what one has laboriously earned. Notwithstanding such returning of awards the honour and prestige that the recipient has garnered does not get diminished and in fact seems to get enhanced. The returning of a once conferred award signifies a growing discontent that erupts into an act of withdrawal or relinquishment as Gopalkrishna Gandhi writes when reminding us that Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi both returned their awards after the massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh. 

The target of disillusionment seems to be government authorities, Central and State arising from the fact that the Sahitya Academies are institutions supported solely by the state. Rulers have always supported the arts and patronage from Kings has yielded now to patronage from elected governments. With the rise of giant corporations in the modern industrialized world one finds an expression of corporate social responsibility in corporate supported foundations  encouraging 

artists with awards that carry substantial purses and coveted for the enormous prestige that accompanies them. 

Here then is a wonderful opportunity for enlightened Indian corporates to enter the vacuum being created and produce bodies like the Man Booker foundation and the Pulitzer foundation, instituting independent juries of learned persons to select men and women of distinction in the various forms of arts.With such actions can they overcome the tag of Philistinism and ensure that unfettered creativity in the arts will always prevail. I only know of the Hindu Literary Award from the Hindu Group of publications that is seeming to be the exception that proves the rule. 

Severe forms of literary criticism

Severe forms of literary criticism

We have been seeing so many forms of literary criticism from the carefully contented positions to the downright vulgar in what Ananya Vajpeyi calls the rectionary present. That is how she says "marginalisation is effected through new forms of bahishkara which extend from the  language of insult and injury  including online trolling and online abuse, to intimidation, physical and sexual violence, and ultimately assassination and genocide."

Rushdie had many decades ago called the assassination of writers as the most severe form of literary criticism.

Now you know why I had to write this story.

Click on link below :-

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D2lb2yS0cAzIrnQvrBCk89ItQL60O_cEHrddGBpdqfg/edit#heading=h.vp7vv7rwagf

The Ban on Beef

Last evening the t v anchors had a ball.  The sensational ‘breaking news’ of a man lynched for the alleged transgression of the ban on #beef was playing on all channels. Thus popped up another facet of the increasing vigilantism being brought to the fore by what a Social Scientist has called the pseudo-religiosity of the dominant power in Indian politics today.

I could not help delving deep into my memory to recollect having read that outstanding book Science and Society in Ancient India by that doyen of Indic studies and ancient Indian philosophies, Debi Prasad Chattopadhyay.

Today early in the morning I spent a good part of an hour searching through my disorganised library till I found the book.  Notwithstanding the feasting on its leaves by bookworms I was able to find some interesting quotations from the Charaka Samhita dealing with the uses of meat and particularly the flesh of the cow in healing as practiced by the ancient physicians.  Throughout the night I had been disturbed by the contradictory thought that the prohibition of sacrifice of the revered animal had finally ended up in the human sacrifice reported.

Some excerpts from the original Sanskrit text quoted in the book are below:

What then are the specific qualities of the cow’s flesh?

Atreya answers: “The flesh of the cow is beneficial for those suffering from loss of flesh due to disorders caused by excess of vayu, rhinitis, irregular fever ... ...and also in cases of excessive appetite resulting from hard work.

And then it goes on to say:

Since persons suffering from consumption are badly in need of adding flesh to their bodies and since the physicians think that the cow’s flesh is ... ... promotive of flesh and plumpness, they freely recommend it for the consumptive patients, along with a number of alternatives to it... ...

Here I must add that gem of an observation to be found in the morning’s newspaper, by a learned Minister of the Government of India who says,

“ ... ...Sanskrit is the voice of India’s soul and wisdom. Sanskrit literature is a great repository of knowledge.” 

We would do well to remember that the Charaka Samhita is part of that great repository.

Questions profound and inane

Abdul Kalam has passed away.  What I remember most about him is his poignant question asking what we are leaving behind for our children – for posterity. Will it be just a collection of temples, mosques and churches?

The profound nature of the question has been lost on us and nowhere could I find that superb rhetoric quoted in any of the obituaries and other writings on his demise.

In striking contrast we have also had that amusingly lovely question from a person classified as an intellectual by an admiring NDTV.  “Have the institutions (in particular IISc. and the Indian Institute of Technology) over the past 60-plus years contributed to making our society and the world a better place?”

Could the same question be asked of Einstein and other Nobel Prize winners?   The furtherance of human knowledge makes contributions that cannot be estimated or even understood by a merchant class that considers the production of wealth as the greatest contribution to ‘making our society and the world a better place’.  As if in an ironic reply to that absurd question we have a country, acknowledged in Europe and all over the world for the production of contributions to ‘making our society and the world a better place’, conferring its highest civilian award to a professor at the Indian Institute of Science.

Highest German Civilian Award for IISc Professor says a headline in today’s paper.

THE END  OF  AUTO DA FE`

“Auto Da Fé, what's an Auto Da Fé?

It's what you oughtn't to do but you do anyway!"

Torquemada tells his monks when describing the Inquisition which involved a public humiliation before burning at the stake.

At the time of the Inquisition condemned heretics would be asked to do a public penance with a procession of the guilty and a reading of their sentence in a public square.  And in the middle of the last century we have seen books being burned publicly and as if in accompaniment a poet  lamented, “Where they burn books, they will end up burning people”.  That was a prophecy that was tragically fulfilled during the Holocaust a few years later. Literally the term auto da fe means an act of faith and one continues through the centuries to be frightened by such acts of faith thrust by the pious upon transgressors.

We have seen books being banned and books being burnt.  We have also seen the withdrawal and pulping of books that purportedly cause offence to people or their beliefs.  And in an act of self-flagellation we have recently seen an author proclaim his death as a writer and forswear the writing of fiction.

Now comes the digital age.  Books are now not just in print on paper.  Books are literally in the air and all over the world. Now burning books will not do and men of faith will have to invent a correspondingly modern method of destruction.  We have reached the end of Auto Da fe.

Inhuman sacrifices

Some of us would have experienced the ignominy of having to cover up one lie by concocting  many lies told serially, each of which may have to be similar covered up leading to a compounding that stretches to an infinity of lies.  But did we expect that to cover up one crime (perhaps lesser than murder) many murders have to be done serially. Yet that seems to be happening not only in the attempts to cover up of sexual molestation by a Godman but even in the attempts to bury the truth about huge amounts of money made by subverting the systems for the selection of prospective candidates to be groomed as professionals in medicine or in the other services as servants of the government.  Where will such a rot in our society lead us to?  An infinity of murders?

Are these then human sacrifices that have to be made in what seems futile attempt to exorcise those demons that have taken hold of us?   As a well know journalist said on T V with the country being run by criminals what do we really expect?  Yet most of us want a decent respectable set of people to govern us without these shenanigans that murkily disfigure the governance of the land.  Or is it that we have after all only got an administration that we deserve.