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November 18 Babunath Madari Garlands Me With A Female Cobra!It was extraordinary!
Delegates to the Adivasi Academy's International Conference on Translation hardly had an idea what was in store for them at Tejgadh.
I was born in Baroda---now known by its Gujarati name Vadodara.
I left my birthplace when I was reaching puberty. My father decided to return to his native city, Bombay---now known as Mumbai. He came to Baroda when my grandfather died in his prime---in 1922.
His eldest uncle was a school Headmaster in Baroda and a part-time Lecturer in Pali at The Baroda College.
My grandfather had invested in real estate in Baroda. He had purchased an entire hill walled by tenements that originally consisted of stables at the ground level and the personnel that looked after the horses kept there lived upstairs. When my grandfather purchased it, it was vacant property.
My grand-uncle---whom we called 'Big Uncle' looked after the property and lived in a two-storeyed house that was at the centre of the flat-topped hill.
Around the house were trees---a grand old Banyan presided over our front yard and to its left was an imposing Neem tree. To the South of the house that faced the East was an Oudumber tree---I think it's called ficus religiosa in Latin. To the North was a Sheoga or drumstick tree and by its side was a small shrine. In our back yard were Tagari, Parijataka, Chikoo, and Pomegranate trees. round the house were other plants and succulents---I remember the Aloe Vera, the Rui, and wild berry shrubs.
Big Uncle became a tenant in an adjacent building after my father got married in 1937 to his college friend.
My mother's parents were also Marathi -speaking immigrants to the princely state of Baroda. They lived about two kilometres away in a Shia Muslim neighbourhood known as Shia Baug.
My mother had eight surviving brothers and three sisters ( out of the eighteen children born to my grandmother, four died early).
My father was the only son my grandparents had. He had an older sister, married and living in Bombay; and a younger one who lived with us then till she took up a job in Bombay and was later married there.
My eight maternal uncles and two aunts were all educated in Baroda and lived in my grandparents' house till they found jobs in the State of Baroda or in Bombay. They were posted all over Gujarat. I visited them during vacations. Some were posted in tribal regions where smaller princes paying tributes to the Maharaja of Baroda ruled.
So I had been to places such as Chhota Udaipur, Deogadh Baria, Rajpipala, ,and the forests between the rivers Narmada and Tapi and along the river Mahi that flowed to the Arabian Sea through the State of Baroda. I also spent some vacations in Navsari in South Gujarat and in the North and the North-West Palanpur, Kadi, Mehsana, and Khambayat; I visited Broach and Surat, Sankheda and Sinor in the South.
The territory around Tejgadh was familiar to me since my childhood. I had climbed Pavagadh in school trips, visited Champaner, and the district capital of the Panchamahals, Godhra ---that now needs no introduction.
We reached Jambughoda in the late afternoon.Viju and I rushed to our room with our soft overnight bags and leather satchels to have a quick wash and to put on appropriate clothes for the evening. Would it be chilly at Tejgadh in the evening? Would we be expected to dress semi-formally for the inauguration?And what about the Keynote Address I was supposed to deliver?
I had mailed my text to Ganesh Devy before I left Pune for Mumbai. He acknowledged it and even appreciated it, which I took with a pinch of salt. Perhaps he was just being a polite host. But I forgot to carry a hard copy of the text when we left Pune for Mumbai in a taxi that took us directly to the domestic airport at Santa Cruz and discovered it was missing from my satchel only after reaching Baroda. Ganesh promised to give all delegates copies of the printout before the inaugural ceremony.
I suspected he had some diabolical design in not giving me my text. I feared the worst. Was my host going to ask me to make an extempore speech before the predominantly Adivasi (indigenous tribes) audience in Hindi or Gujarati?
I didn't exactly panic but was sort of resigned to the prospect of performing before a mixed audience of not only local tribes from Gujarat but also from other parts of India. Then there were my conference colleagues, mostly academics and/or from NGOs, voluntary agencies, and even from statutory government bodies. The participants included North Americans and Europeans presumably trying to get over their culture shock.
It began to seem steeper by the minute as I faced my task, my one hour of fame or shame in front of an unpredictable audience.I've never done this before, but I put on the 'garland' of Indian basil 'beads'---the Tulsi Mala that a Varkari wears all the time. I was carrying it in my satchel, perhaps subconsciously as my talisman for protection, if any sudden crisis confronted me.
" Depart from your academic text addressed to the symposium participants," Ganesh gently whispered to me before the proceedings began, " Speak to the whole assembly. Use Hindi or Gujarati. Throw in a bit of Marathi if you must. Summarise what you say in English, Don't exclude any members of the audience by your choice of language. Just speak from your heart."
As a filmmaker I have spoken similarly to actors; and as a teacher to my students getting a stage fright or that cold feeling in the pit of the stomach when asked to stand up and speak to the whole class in a new course.
But counselling others is another thing.
Did I have anything to say to all these people expecting me to edify them?
It was Lord Shiva who came to my rescue as I rose, to speak, a microphone in my hand like a rock singer (but totally clueless) and reached the centre of the open-to-sky quadrangle of the Adivasi Academy squarely besieged by my audience that sat in the long portico. There was a courtyard where Ganesh and I stood.
---And of course Lord Shiva, the primordial cosmic forest-dweller in the form of Babunath Madari, with his wicker basket that contained a sleek black female cobra.
"Now Babunath will garland you with the live cobra," Ganesh informed me in a whisper that sounded like a sinister hiss, " Don't worry. Babunath is an expert snake handler. The cobra's harmless!"
It was surreal.
Had Ganesh scripted this whole event to get me out of my intellectual skin?
I don't know.
But as Babunath opened the basket, the indignant reptile shot out with a raised hood doubtlessly to strike at the honoured guest. He pushed her back momentarily and coaxed her out again, this time holding her neck.
I touched her as though it was my own uncoiling Kundalini--the spiritual female serpent power, and made a gesture of blessing that could be interpreted as appeasement.
Was there a deafening applause?
I heard only my own voice speaking in Hindi with a charged urgency as though I were possessed.
The rest, I hope, is history.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
November 16 Adivasi Academy: Go Learn from the First People!Ganesh Devy used to be a Professor of English when I met him first, I think in the late 1980s or the early 1990s. I knew of him a little bit before we met. His 'guru'---Professor M.D. Hatkananglekar---was a literary friend.
Hatkananglekar taught English for a number of years in the Willingdon College, Sangli, in South Maharashtra where he later was Principal. Hatkananglekar is a Marathi literary critic, and an influential one who, through his own writing and that of his proteges' publicly expressed opinions, moulded the literary taste of two generations of Marathi readers since the 1970s.
By then I had achieved more notoriety than fame among Marathi readers upsetting their ideas of poetry and fiction since 1955 when I arrived on the scene somewhat precociously and early at the age of 17.
My writing provoked, and often angered or confused the 'Establishment'. They labelled me 'controversial' for a start and in a rising crescendo of derogatory epithets called me other names such as a 'perverted purveyor of sexual aberration', 'a subversive literary influence on the emerging generation of poets and writers', 'a Westernized bohemian who strayed from native Marathi culture', a 'nihilist', ' a cold blooded cynic'---and so on.
Those were the years of the cold war between the West led by capitalist America and the socialist revolutionaries led by the then Soviet Union.
I was in the 'bad company' of 'so-called liberals', 'stooges of the imperialists', and 'CIA agents' such as Jayaprakash Narayan, Minoo Masani, and followers of M.N. Roy such as A.B. Shah, V. B. Karnik, Lakshmanshastri Joshi, Prabhakar Padhye, Sib Narayan Ray, M. P. Rege, G.D. Parikh, M. Govindan, and V. M. Tarkunde---targets for card-holding and fellow-travelling communists and their various front networks.
These were people much senior to me in age and intellectual authority.
Through my college years in Mumbai from the mid-1950s, I was exposed to a world in turmoil. A series of upheavals were taking place in quick succession as though an undeclared World War had already enveloped the world with fierce regional battles waging in 'The Third World' consisting of new nation-states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Korean War, the Viet Nam War, the Chinese takeover of Tibet, the Cuban Revolution, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile crisis, the Congo crisis, the Ghana Crisis, the Suez Crisis,the Algerian civil war, the rise of benevolent socialist tyrants such as Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sukarno, Nkrumah, Castro, and of 'democratic' dictators and military chieftains with a penchant for genocide and mass-murder looming large in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe made it a sickening and ideologically turgid world during my formative decade.
In the event, I developed my own fusion of radical leftist instincts and uncompromising liberal humanism. Among Indian leaders Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Lohia were my favourite tragic heroes. With their failures and death, all traces of a romantic Indian nationalism on which I was raised as a child were effectively erased.
It was when the English poet Stephen Spender resigned from the magazine 'Encounter' after it was found to be the clandestine recipient of CIA funding that all hell broke loose around the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom, also funded via the same secret CIA pipeline that I decided to join the ICCF as a full member and to commit my self to write a regular freewheeling column for their magazine 'Quest' that was modelled on 'Encounter'.
Professor A. B. Shah---then Editor of 'Quest' and Executive Secretary of the ICCF--- thought of me as 'a philosophical ararchist', in exasperation.
I argued against him on almost everything and he put it down to my being 'a poet and an artist'. If he or Minoo Masani were to head a Republic at that time, I was sure they would have, like Plato, shown me the door. But I was allowed to live with my 'irrational and anarchic ideas of citizenship' among those authoritarian rationalists and autocratic intellectuals for I stood by them in a crisis.
Hatkananglekar was a friend of both Prabhakar Padhye and A.B. Shah. I met him at a seminar convened by him at Willingdon College, Sangli to assess the first fifty years of the Soviet Union. The year was 1967. I presented a paper reviewing writing in the Soviet Union under the title 'Creativity in Crisis: The Soviet Story'. I think Josef Brodsky and Andrei Sinyavsky were under trial then. Perhaps Ganesh Devy was a student then. But I don't recall meeting him.
This long-winded narration of where I came from and what I was headed for is in some ways relevant to how Devy perceived me when he contacted me through Jayant Deshpande in the late 1980s to ask my permission to translate and publish some of my essays in the magazine 'Setu'( Bridge) founded by the Gujarati poet and writer Suresh Joshi.
After Sureshbhai passed away, Devy inherited the editorial mantle and kept the magazine alive for a few issues. Sureshbhai was older than me, but a friend whom I admired. My artist friends in Baroda, Bhupen Khakkar and Gulam Mohammad Shaikh, were also active supporters of 'Setu'.
Soon after this, Ganesh Devy's major book of literary criticism--'After Amnesia' appeared.
'The Times of India' asked me to review it and I reviewed it at length, recording my appreciation of Devy's theses that were sure to upset a lot of Westernized Indian literary scholars.
At first sight, Devy seemed to have joined the 'nativist' bandwagon of the Marathi novelist and critic Bhalchandra Nemade, a favourite of Marathi readers that followed Nemade's generation and mine.
Nemade's book of critical essays, 'Teekasvayamvar' had just received the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award. His first novel 'Kosla' deserved that award; but not this uneven, opinionated, and messiah-like championing of 'desi' against 'Western' culture in a simplified dialectical relationship in the style of a high priest of culture.
Perhaps Hatkananglekar's friendship with Nemade and his admiration of everything he said or stood for had rubbed on Devy. But Devy went beyond Nemade in a methodical scholarly manner in ' After Amnesia'. He touched deeper cultural chords and found roots that were not noticed in 'The Little Tradition'.
And his later mentor was none other than Mahashweta Devi, the great Bangla writer and activist of whom I am personally much enamoured.
I met 'Didi' first at the 1986 Frankfurter Buchmesse where India was the'Schwerpunktthema' and some 25 of us were invited.
The Marathi Dalit writer Daya Pawar, Didi, and I somehow got invited to lecture to university students in Frankfurt. We bonded in a short time.
Arun Kolatkar, Daya Pawar and I were the three Marathi writers in our pluri-lingual, pan-Indian group. The fourth Marathi invitee was playwright Vijay Tendulkar, but he had other commitments elsewhere.
Didi is a fanatical activist fighting for the rights of the 'denotified tribes and castes' ---formerly stigmatised by the British as 'criminal tribes' and 'notified' as such in Government Gazettes and 'legally' regarded as 'congenital criminals'.
Nehru's government 'denotified' them but they still remain stigmatized and are victims of state brutality at the hands of 'Sanskritized' cops.
Ganesh resigned his Professorship in 1996 and started a tribal languages and oral traditions centre in Baroda for the conservation and propagation of tribal languages, literature, and wisdom systems.
BRPC or Bhasha Samshodhan Kendra instituted an Annual Verrier Elwin Lecture and they invited Mahashweta Devi to deliver it in, I think, the second year. Didi delivered the lecture; but then, true to her proselytizing activist spirit, asked Ganesh the same question that she had asked me in Frankfurt," But what are you doing for the denotified tribes in your area?"
Ganesh had just entered one unfamiliar territoy. He wasn't prepared to have too much on his plate with these DNTs of whom he was only vaguely aware.
He took a further step and established the 'Adivasi Academy' in Tejgadh, in the Panchmahal District of Gujarat, a two hour drive from Baroda. Mahashweta Devi re-laid the fondation stone of the 'Adivasi Academy'. ( The actual first foundation stone was laid by the then BJP-appointed Governor of Gujarat, Sundersingh Bhandari. But after the Godhra pogroms who with any conscience would keep such a stone? Godhra is only a stone's throw from Tejgadh in the same Panchmahals district!)
My wife Viju and I are just back from an international conference on translation at Tejgadh.
We were both overwhelmed by what we saw and its implications for human civilization on our only planet now in the throes of a consumerist-capitalist globalization.
If Tejgadh fails, human values will collapse. If it succeeds, The First and The Last People will bring about a quiet revolution through universal empowerment of the human species to help them against the jaggernaut of hyperurbanisation that is bound to damage human awareness and resources beyond possible repair, destroying our habitat itself.
(TO BE CONTINUED) |
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