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February 18 BACK TO BLOGGINGViju, my wife, thinks I have been squandering my precious time and energy writing blogs and surfing the internet looking for people who are only real, not virtual. She has no objection to my serious uses of internet, which indeed are few. August 28 THE DEATH OF BHUJANG MESHRAMLast night I received an SMS from Hemant Divate---friend, fellow-poet and publisher. It told me of the untimely death of Bhujang Meshram, a contemporary poet from the Gond 'Adivasi' tribe that once ruled the forest heartland of India and has now been colonised, oppressed, and is being systematically decimated by our government's 'development' projects dominated by tyrannical economic policies that are paraded as initiatives in liberalization.
Bhujang's poetry rose from his own besieged and embattled world. He wrote and published poems first in the Marathi language that was not his mother tongue. Later, he infused the idiom and vocabulary of his poetry with his Gondi language and dialect. It was a poetry that stood firm on the poet's identity, voice, and location. It was a part of the politics of identity that informs much of today's tribal, dalit, feminist, and even gay poetry. But Bhujang's poetry uses techniques that are bold and innovative.
Bhujang was barely fifty when he died suddenly and in his literary prime. He was close to both my wife Viju and me whom he addressed as Tai ( Elder Sister) and me as Dada (elder brother). He would visit us at short notice or unannounced, late in the evening, and bringing for me my favourite beverage---wine or liquor made from the flowers of the Mahuva tree. We would sit through the night, until I began to yawn or doze. Then he would vanish into the night, as he has vanished now, alas forever.
Bhujang was a heavy drinker. Alcohol for him was fraught with unpredictable consequences. It often brought out all his hurts and his anger against the system that he served. If he was not physically in our midst, he would call on the telephone, often audibly drunk. Sometimes he was paranoid, swinging between feelings of persecution and delusions of grandeur. However, Bhujang was a warm and generous human being, a remarkable poet, and above all a citizen of the troubled time and space of India that we claim as our own despite frustration and alienation. August 23 Poets BirthdaysVinda Karandikar, is 90 Today! August 23 is the birthday of Vinda alias Govind Vinayak Karandikar. Today he is exactly ninety years old. I spoke with him a little while ago on the phone as he is one of my many 'Gurus' in poetry as well as in life. I reviewed his second collection of Marathi poems in 1954 when I hadn't yet graduated from high school. My review was published by the then leading Marathi cultural weekly Mouj. Vinda was so excited by my appreciation of his poetry that he wrote me a postcard using every millimetre of its scant space and invited me to see him in person at his residence in Mahim, a suburb of Mumbai. In the event we met, he a person twenty-one years older than me, and I just deciding that poetry and the fine arts were my true vocation. I took admission in the Ramnarain Ruia College in Matunga, Mumbai where he had recently joined as a lecturer in English. For my B.A. I chose English Literature as my major subject. Vinda taught us English prosody for our Honours degree. He came from the Konkan coast of Maharashtra and his English accent was influenced by his Marathi dialect. Students who came from English medium schools made fun of him for his quaint English accent and his whimsical style of teaching. But they also held him in awe partly because his grasp of prosody and partly because of his booming voice that went far beyond the classroom. As a reader of poetry from a platform---whether in Marathi or in English---Vinda is unique. He is a performer who browbeats his audience with a thundering and sometimes melodramatic voice. Quite theatrical, he injures his own tender and delicately nuanced phrases and lines with an aggressive pitch and volume. However, he is loved by Marathi audiences and readers, and when he recently won the Jnanpith Award the whole of Maharashtra was ecstatic. A.K. Ramanujan, Ramesh Sarkar, and Vilas Sarang have translated some of his poems into English; as have I, and Arun Kolatkar, though Kolatkar's translations cannot, unfortunately, be traced. I wish him a long life. He would be able to use it well. He has donated the amounts received as literary awards to ngos and individuals doing social work. The longer he lives, the longer they all will be able to work in the public interest! August 01 And Now Antonioni Passes Away!Yesterday, it was Bergman; today, it's Antonioni. Two classic filmmakers gone one after the other. As the journalistic cliche puts it, "End of an era." Era indeed! Cinema has changed with digital technology.
Antonioni was a maestro of the art of cinema. He was 94 when he died. I 'discovered' him late. Blow Up was his first film I saw. I saw it four times in Mumbai. Then I saw his earlier and later masterpieces in India and abroad.
One good thing about digital technology: one can possess DVDs of the works of the great masters of cinema---from the silent era to the end of the 20th century. Digital technology allows us the luxury of becoming recluses. July 31 Ingmar Bergman Dies at 89Ingmar Bergman has died at the age of 89. Since the late 1950s, when cinema became an abiding passion for me, Bergman was one of my mentors in screenwriting and filmmaking. The near-religious moral torture reflected in his work found a resonance in his work, though his father was a Lutheran clergyman and mine an agnostic Hindu, it seemed to me that we battled similar paternal ghosts. Most of the dozen or so short stories I wrote were proto-screenplays, and when I made my only feature film Godam (1983) at the age of 45, my guiding lights were Luis Bunuel, Ritwick Ghatak, and Ingmar Bergman. Bunuel's surreal flair, Ghatak's intense lyricism, and Bergman's relentless narrative drive were among decisive legacies in the evolution of my own style. Today I realize that my former idol was thirty years older than me and was a Scandinavian. He was younger than my father but of the same generation. I was two years old when Bergman won his first major cinema award for a screenplay; and he went on to make more than 50 films. As an Indian, I knew it was a near-impossibility to make independent art house films a career. Though even in the West, it is never easy. Bergman's best work is classic; you go back to it again and again and find subtle resonances and complex textures that you missed before. This is what timelessness is about. Fifty Years of Being A poet March 28 Editing One's Own WorkI have been occupied with a task I always dreaded: selecting my own poems for a collection that would include my English poems from 1964 till the beginning of 2007. My first published English collection of poems was TRAVELLING IN A CAGE. It came out in 1980, twenty years after my first Marathi collection KAVITA, though I have been writing in both the languages since 1954. The gap kept widening ever since. My second Marathi book of poems, KAVITENANTARCHYA KAVITA was published in 1978. My second English book of poems THE MOUNTAIN came out in 1998. My third Marathi book of poems DAHA BY DAHA was published in 1983. It was followed by my collected Marathi poems---EKOON KAVITA 1, 2, and 3. However, my third English book was the long poem NO MOON MONDAY AT THE RIVER KARHA (2000) and my fourth, too, was a single poem POST-CLIMACTIC LOVE POEM that appeared in 2004. Writing English poetry in India where there are no literary magazines to speak of and no publishers for books of poetry ( except anthologies with an eye on the domestic textbook market) requires one to be tenacious and stoic to an unusual degree. Writing in a native Indian language (as I do too) is far less difficult. Very few of my poems have been published when they were written. The first few appeared Indian little magazines such as 'Damn You', 'Blunt', and 'Dionysus' and 'Intrepid' in the USA. This was in the 1960s. Nissim Ezekiel, when he was Poetry Editor of 'The Illustrated Weekly of India', invited me to contribute and published some of my work. Dom Moraes, whom I first met i in 1958 recorded an interview with Arun Kolatkar and me for the BBC and we received five guineas each as a fee. In the mid-1960s, I met Adil Jussawala for the first time in Mumbai. He was visiting India from England. The two of us were invited to read our poems by the University of Bombay's English Department. Adil later included my poems in his Penguin anthology of new writing in India. There were hardly any literary magazines or journals in India then. Even now, there aren't many. Magazines in England and in the USA seemed remote and I wondered whether my kind of poetry would make sense to them. I just continued to write poems regardless, and they continued to accumulate among my several piles of notebooks and handwritten sheets of paper. It was after the publication of 'Travelling in a Cage' that my English poems suddenly got some attention. I was far luckier with my Marathi poems. By the time my first book in English appeared, I had been a known poet in Marathi for more than twenty years. I was also known as a translator of Marathi poetry into English. It was Adil Jussawala, one of the four founders of 'Clearing House', the first cooperative small poetry imprint in Bombay, who took the initiative in bringing out 'Travelling in a Cage' and selected the poems himself. The book was published along with Jayanta Mahapatra's 'False Start'. The four earlier poets published by 'Clearing House' were Arun Kolatkar ('Jejuri'), Adil Jussawala ( 'Missing Person'), Gieve Patel ( 'How Do You Withstand, Body'), and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra ( 'Distance in Statute Miles'). 'Clearing House' closed after publishing two more titles---'Nine Enclosures' by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and 'Lobo' by Hubert Nazareth. In the mid-1980s, after I had moved with my family from Bhopal to Pune, the Department of English of the University of Pune had convened a conference on Indian writing in English. To my delight, some of my friends and favourite poets who lived far came to Pune to attend. Arun, Adil, and Arvind were there and there was Agha Shahid Ali, then visiting India. In a friendly way, they cornered me and pressed me to publish my selected poems. I said I would not be able to handle the selection myself. Shahid volunteered to do it for me if I handed him the manuscripts before he left for the USA. For some reason, I couldn't keep my promise and let go of another opportunity of being edited by a contemporary whose work I loved. More than twenty years have passed since. I have now done the job myself. 'As Is, Where Is' is now in the press. It will be published by the young Marathi poet and publisher Hemant Divate under his imprint 'Poetrywala'. It is not yet my collected poems but it is large enough a book and late enough published to be treated as such by readers and critics. March 24 Making poems: out of what?Poein means 'to make or to compose'. The Greek and Latin etymology of 'poetry' leads us to the practice of poetry and the changing concept of such praxis. Of course, poetry is a prehistoric and global practice, as old as human speech itself, which is its raw material. Writing was invented much later as a sharable notation of speech in order to preserve it. Writing added the first technological dimension to language and made it possible to objectively memorize and record it and thus to 'dislocate' it from its speaker. It enabled some speakers and/or listeners to become 'writers'. However, all writers were not poets. Poets were only those who used language as a special mode of speech: this mode stressed rhythm, change of pitch and register, expressed feeling and articulated emotion, and improvised itself according to the listeners' response. It was no doubt addressed to a present 'community'---a live audience. Poetry is a unique literary genre today because of the special demand it makes on its reader as its performing participant. One has to recreate a poem as speech from its written text; and this is an act of interpretation where the reader is called upon to appropriate the text, 'listen' to it, and voice it again---be it to oneself. When the reader takes the position of the poet who is the source voice, the poet and the poem are 'recognized' and empathized with. All poems have a contested identity because they are variously performed by readers. All of them point to the same text. Yet its resonances vary for most of them. The proof of a poem is in its reading. However, a reading undergoes a series of complex mediations. People who read a poem agree or disagree with one another about how it should be read. A consensus does not always emerge. The identity of a poem is contested again and again. What emerges from the debate is new schools of critical interpretation or even new ways of reading and writing poetry and placing it in our individual as well as community lives. Poetry was part of the primitive human invention of theatre. It belonged to the same cluster of creative activities as dancing, singing, acting, and storytelling; and not very much removed from 'possession', magical rites, and early religious chants. Poems were presumably addressed to natural and supernatural forces, good and evil, and powers that were outside human reach in the belief that language could reach far beyond the limited world of its listeners. March 17 Saving One's Own Voice and Separating All NoiseA poet's identity is in her/his own voice because all poetry is a unique form of speech that its listener/reader can identify. A poem is a unique relationship between its speaker and its listener. Most, if not all, of us possess the ability to identify or recognize faces and voices of people. When listening skills are further honed, a sharper and finer image of a particular poet's voice, and the tone of a specific poem, can be perceived. The details of language used in a poem are all framed within its voice and contained in its tones and textures. A poem makes us attentive to its language in a special way. Listening to poetry is like listening to music. First, you must become aware that the sounds music makes are deliberate or spontaneous human-made sounds and that those sounds are made according to human-made rules. The rules can vary and they can be changed. But unless you understand them, you cannot understand the music as a larger system within which what you are listening to is placed. Similarly, the voice of poetry is really a wider realm of human voices addressed to listeners. The more unique voices a listener has heard, the mgreater becomes her/his developed skill to identify and recognize each voice as a 'location'. Poets and their poems are locations within much larger and vastly varied languagescapes. This is seldom understood by teachers of poetry in schools. They often damage the listening skills of their students because their own hearing is impaired by what they learnt and how they learnt. Poetry and art teachers in schools, and even in colleges and universities, are seldom aware of the damage learning systems do to those who have innate abilities to learn. They deprive their students of the profound experience of poetry as an art by imposing limited 'purposive' agendas by way of teaching them wrong ways of measuring their own experience and making it conform to generalized notions. At a certain stage, a student who cannot find enjoyment in learning poetry off the page of a textbook, simply gives up. Education often blunts the sense perception and the mental process that follows it. A society with a deadened sensibility is the result. Sensitization of human beings to one another used to be one of the noble goals of education. This cannot be confused with moral education that always has disastrous effects on growing minds. Training the senses and the mind eventually contributes to moral evolution and not vice versa. We learn on our own and from our own trials and errors. We cannot learn unless the learner's independent and individual ability to learn is absolutely trusted. That trust is still lacking in even the most advanced societies today. March 16 Is a poem a thing? Is a poem a service or a product?About two decades ago, I wrote an essay in Marathi---Kavi Kaay Kaam Karato---raising certain fundamental issues about the evaluation of a poet's contribution to society and his/her place in society. The title of the essay roughly translates into English as : What Work Does A Poet Do? I was provoked to write this essay by a question asked of me in different forms by family, friends, and strangers ever since I seriously decided at the age of sixteen that I was and would be a poet; and therefore poetry would be my mother tongue and the very source of my identity. I may have been an idiot then as I must be even now because I have not given up yet. Meanwhile, a whole lifetime has been spent in writing poetry and supporting it by doing all sorts of things society values more than the writing of poetry. Being a philosophical animal by nature, I am puzzled by life and its self-awareness that I seek to explore and celebrate through poetry and through its other sibling art forms and their progeny of art genres. As a living being, since my early childhood, I am profoundly aware of my mortality and the perishability of all persons, things, and relationships that surround me. Life, especially one's own, is a perennial puzzle; and so is death, its constant companion. However, puzzles are the problem of rationality; and human life is driven by passion, including even the passion to explore its surroundings. For myself, I found the right register for this in the mystical world-view of Shaivism---an esoteric branch of Hindu praxis often mistaken because of its metaphorical expression for a 'theology'. The philosophy of 'Shivadvaya' or 'the not being separable of Shiva' came intuitively to me during my rather precocious childhood and it has continued to evolve since. Unlike other branches of Hindu thought that originate in the scriptures ( 'Nigama'), Shaivism is non-scriptual, and therefore non-textual teaching; it comes directly ( 'Aagama') from a Guru (which simply means 'a greater one' in terms of experience, practice, knowledge, power, and grace). Shivadvaya has a unique cosmology---in essence it is a mythopoetic story of genesis: 'Shiva', the male is a tranquil void that contains 'Shakti' the female desire to be and to become many. Shakti stirs within Shiva, and Shiva is aroused and curious to find the form of what stirs within him. This is how creation began: with Shiva the non-being containing Shakti that is being. The two are inseparable and yet they cannot be absolutely one except in the state of deluge or dissolution of all phenomena. The tension between Shiva and Shakti is an erotic tension which is what life is about. Life is fundamentally erotic. It seeks to unite with the Other or what it perceives as not being itself. It also seeks its own orgasmic end in that union. Life desires to die but only on condition of a sense of fulfilment; and that, according to Kashmir Shaivism and its Marathi extension by Shri Jnandev, is the poetics of Bhakti, mutual absorption of the self and the other, that became my world-view. It was the two great Marathi poets, Jnandev (13th century) and Tukaram (17th century) in whom I found the resonance that became the pitch and the register of my work even in English. The philosophical calm of Jnandev and the existential anguish of Tukaram define the temper and range of Marathi Bhakti poetry; I was born in a different world at a different time with a self-doubting modernity and a sense of tragic irony that pervaded my own life. But without understanding where I come from, it is not possible to explain how my work in my two chosen languages of self-expression coheres, if it coheres at all. Alternatively, as a bilingual poet, I have, at best, just been a spectacular schizophrenic! March 15 Poetry in the Age of ConsumerismI write poetry in two languages: Marathi and English. Looking at the way poetry is written and received in both these languages, I observe that in the 1950s when I started seriously reading and writing poetry it was still regarded as an art. Over the next five decades, it got transformed into a product---either a commodity or a service. Marathi and English have each their own distinctive literary traditions. But these differences notwithstanding, the changed status of poetry in the last fifty years is a phenomenon both share in India. It connects with deeper and wider changes of a political and economic nature. It also changes roles and rules in a profound---and for me disturbing---way. Of all literary genres, poetry is the most condensed and in a certain formal sense most disciplined. Even on an epic scale, it is structured differently from prose and the prose art form that is fiction. Poetry is founded in music but improvised through an interplay of ideas and images and made palpable by its deviation from the normal routines of everyday language and speech. Its cognitive aspects cannot be separated from its artistic form even as it makes subtle subliminal connections among disparate co In the last fifty years or so, in my personal observation, readers are less and less prepared for poetry and more and more influenced by prose. The increasingly peripheral position of poetry in the print media has given it a ritual and ceremonial status distanced from the central concerns of mundane life and its values as well as its issues. Fewer readers read poetry. Larger numbers of them read fiction and even non-fiction. The largest number of them read newspapers and magazines. Fifty years ago, the readers of poetry knew what to expect of poetry. Today, most of them don't know. Most of the new readers of poetry don't know its history as an art in different cultures and traditions. They have very little memory of poetry and very scanty knowledge of its culture since antiquity. Some of them can't even distinguish it from catchy advertising copy or hummable and cliched song. February 10 MY BOOKS IN THE PIPELINE
September 07 Fifty Years of Being A poetMy first Marathi poem was published in 1954 in a literary magazine. I was sixteen then and was still in high school. My first published poems in English appeared in my college magazine in 1957. Some of my early work has survived and some has been lost. Much of my early work has been preserved by Viju ( who became my wife in 1960) and now forms part of my three-volume collected Marathi poems (824 pages)--Ekoon Kavita 1,2, and 3. My published poetry in English is found in three collections published so far: Travelling in a Cage (1980), The Mountain (1998), and No Moon Monday on the River Karha (2000). In addition, there are my uncollected English poems scattered over back issues of small magazines and journals published in India, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.A. as well as about 300 unpublished poems. Among my translations of poetry from Marathi are Says Tuka (1991) and Anubhavamrut: The Immortal Experience of Being ( 1996) and I am currently finalizing my selected translations of my contemporary Marathi poet, Namdeo Dhasal. Among my younger Marathi contemporaries, I have translated an entire first collection of poems by Hemant Divate (Virus Alert; 2003). I have translated a number of major English, American, and European poets into Marathi although most of these remain scattered and uncollected. Poetry has been my main activity in life and it is deeply connected with my work in other genres of literature, my painting, and my work in cinema. Even in the most civilized societies of the world, poets receive ambivalent treatment. Some of them are celebrated, revered, quoted, given awards and prizes. But few of them are ever remunerated sufficiently to make a living as poets. The economic value of what poets do is considered extremely dubious. What is given to them often looks like charity or patronage. The most they can hope for during a lifetime are niche audiences scattered far and wide and small publishers crazy enough to publish poetry without any regard to sales. On this background, I should consider myself very fortunate that my selected poems of the last fifty years translated from Marathi and English by Lothar Lutze have just been published by A1-Verlag, Munich under the title Der Banyanbaum Ausgewahlte Gedichte. This book contains poems written between 1954 and 2004 and they are about my changing world (and me responding to life as a poet) spanning half a century. A similar selection of my Marathi and English poems is under way. I feel no regret for having been no more than a poet. It was what I chose to be and to do within my span of life. July 11 MEMOIRS : TO WRITE OR NOT TO WRITEI have just finished writing a narrative/non-narrative account of the mental agony I suffered since late last year and how it affected my interpersonal and social behaviour. One of the more obvious explanations for what triggered the manic-depressive or bipolar disorder was what psychiatric practitioners call 'postponed or unfinished mourning'. I lost my only child Ashay on November 29, 2003 to accidental asphxyiation from an unnoticed domestic fire. Ashay was alone in our flat in Pune and a slowly burning coir mattress had virtually filled our entire flat with thick smoke when neighbours broke the door to find him lying unconscious at his bedroom door. Viju and I were on a visit to Germany and Yohul was in Mumbai with his cousins. We received the news in Germany in the early hours of Saturday, November 23 but we could reach Pune only on Monday.
My narrative, which is as convoluted as such things tend to be, is called
standstill.
unfinished requiem for a lost son
I had not planned it as a book but it took on its own life and identity and formed a whole cluster of visual images, excerpts, poems, quotations, and so forth.
At the moment I am not very sure what I will do with it. It seems, even in its present shape, a unique work that I can share with a larger readership far beyond my kinship and friendship networks. It is the story of a father-son relationship ever since Ashay became one of the unsung victim-survivors of the industrial disaster in Bhopal on December 3-4, 1984. June 27 Back to the blog after a prolonged silence...It feels very strange that my last blog entry should have been on the Adivasi Academy in Tejgadh and another on some memories of Arun Kolatkar. My life took a remarkable after my return from Tejgadh and Baroda. Little did I know that I would be soon in the throes of a mental illness characterized by extreme mood swings over which the victim loses control. This dreaded disease is known as manic-depressive or bipolar disorder. After Tejgadh, I had three more public engagements, in that order, to receive the GANGADHAR MEMORIAL NATIONAL AWARD FOR POETRY instituted by the University of Sambalpur in Orissa. The award was to be given in Sambalpur on January 4, 2006. Viju and I have always dreamed about visiting our friend, the poet Jatyanta Mahapatra and his wife in Cuttack, then visiting Konark before it crumbles into the sands where it stands on the coastline of Orissa. But my deepening depression made the idea of such a journey immensely difficult to me. In the event, we pushed ourselves into this trip fraught with many uncertainties about my condition. We were very lucky to have been the guests of the Telegu poet Jayaprabha and her husband Soorya in Hyderabad. They are such a warm and hospitable couple. Viju was meeting Jaya/Prabha for the first time and they got along well. We left Pune on December 31, were in Hyderabad till January 2, reached Cuttack via Bhubaneshwar and stayed with Runu and Jayanta. On January 3, we reached Sambalpur, spent the night in the University Guest House. On January 4, I received my award and we returned the next day to Cuttack, visited Konark with Jayanta and finally returned home to Pune via Hyderabad. November 21 POSSESSED: BY THE COSMIC ADIVASI, SHIVAWas it a case of 'possession'? Self-hypnosis? A spontaneous performance which, afterwards, leaves the performer empty, and bewildered, and with the question, "did I really do it, or was it someone else speaking through me?"? The feeling was familiar, though I have experienced it only on a few counts of the fingers of one hand in a lifetime spanning 67 years by now. I'll have to get a video or audio recording of it from Genesh Devy to figure out if and how it relates to my conscious mental processes, to my writing, my filmmaking, my painting. I am aware of the constant tussle between rationality and creativity in the human brain, the Shiva half and the Shakti half, the right and the left, normally polarized and focussed to exclude or negate the Other. The Conference was more of a carnival or a festival such as Holi or Mahashivaratri. Adivasis from near and far poured into Tejgadh to celebrate their own university, perhaps the first of its kind to announce their stake in the future of the planet, and some hidden hope of reversing globalization and its mega-urban, consumerist, and capitalist sweep. I may be called an incorrigible romantic or a utopian idealist for saying this, but I can foresee a global trend against the kind of somnambulist consumerism Pied Pipering the middle class masses into Malls with insatiable and therefore exhausting greed that is giving rise to an epidemic of acquisition-mania now in upbeat bourgeois India. Soon, people will start looking for alternatives, and here's a viable one. Years ago, while making a documentary film on the region, I visited Toranmal in the Satpura cluster of mountains and hills, and drank Mahuva ---the world's only wine made fom fermented flowers of the magical Mahu tree---the 'poor' Adivasi's cornucopia. The shy Paora Bhils who brought us the wine were then being converted into industrial labour by the nearby co-operative sugar factory that drew them into a wage economy. In the event, they were made to cut down the forest that fed them, work for illegal timber contractors with whom the Forest Department obviously connived, and carry loads of sugarcane to be crushed in the factory. This was 'development' in the eyes of the 'visionary' Congress MLA who commisioned the documentary that I was hired to write and direct. The producer was a friend in Mumbai who was struggling to establish himself as an independent documentary film producer. While shooting the film, I realized with horror what this 'development' was leading to. At the editing table, I subverted the theme and the message of the film by juxtapoing the lyrical freedom of the Paora's life in nature against his/her exploitation and conversion into a zombie daily wage earner who, instead of Mahuva got drunk on hooch made by some desi industrial distillery. I told m producer that I wouldn't like to be associated with the film. I quit. But whn I was drinking Mahuva on top of the picturesque heights of Toranmal, I wondered if it would not be possible for the Indian Republic to hand over all forestry rights to the Adivasi, buy Mahuva from him to be bottled and labelled in the nearest towns, and export it as the wold's only wine made from flowers that grew wild on trees in forest sanctuaries. I am still a wine-lover. And I still dream beyond our collective nightmre of a civilization going bonkers. All such memories came back to me that night in Tejgadh.
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) September 25 REMEMBERING ARUN KOLATKARrememberingarunkolatkar
___________________________________________
Arun died one year ago today.
Had he died suddenly, it would have seemed inappropriate. Since we
first met in 1954 and instantly became friends, I did not find Arun
doing anything suddenly. Everything he did appeared to have been
premeditated, the result of a long drawn-out process of deliberation.
Of course, that process of deliberation was revealed by Arun to some
people who were close to him in that particular phase of his life. I
was one of them but let me hasten to add that it was not always so.
He was more than six years
older. At sixteen, when I first met him, he seemed very senior. He was
twenty-two then, just married, and an adult living an independent life.
It was my final year at high school. I still wore shorts. I lived with
my parents, my grandmother, and three sisters and two brothers in a
flat at Dadar that we shared with a family friend. Arun and Darshan
(his first wife) lived in a ramshackle cottage-like house in Malad, a
suburb of Mumbai that seemed like a seaside village then. A half
century separates then from now.
The difference between our
ages did not come in the way of our appreciation of each other's work
as poets. If Arun had ever tried to patronize me in any way, there just would not have been the kind of relationship that we had for the next fifty years.
We accepted each other as equals at a time when both of us knew that what we wrote was already avant garde poetry
in Marathi; and what we wrote in English was determined by a culture
very different from that of traditional anglophone countries. English
was not our mother-tongue but our second language. We had not imbibed
it as much through listening and speaking skills as through reading
skills.
After all, Arun came to cosmopolitan Mumbai from
Kolhapur, a small town in South Maharashtra and a former Maratha
princely state, and I from Baroda, in Central Gujarat, another Maratha
princely state. It was in Mumbai that we both spoke English with mostly
other Indians whose mother-tongue wasn't English but who were taught
English at school. Both of us were voracious readers, though; and both
of us were addicted to watching British and American films, and to
listening to English language radio broadcasts.
Mumbai (then still Bombay
for English speakers) liberated us. My family moved from Baroda to
Mumbai in 1951-52, when I was thirteen. Our relationship with the city,
though, went back to the first decade of the century when my
grandfather made his maverick business career in the city.
My father was born in Mumbai in 1914. After my grandfather's sudden and untimely death in 1922, my grandmother and her children were taken to Baroda by my eldest grand uncle. My grandfather had invested in property in Baroda and so they had their own house there. After three decades in Baroda and in the face of financial reverses in his printing business, my father sold his house and land in Baroda and we moved to Mumbai. In Arun's case, it was
different. His father was an officer in the education department in
Kolhapur when Arun was born in 1931 ( the 'official' year of Arun's
birth is given as 1932 for some reason). Arun's father could be posted
to different places and indeed did move out of Kolhapur later. However,
Arun was in Kolhapur till he passed out of high school and enrolled in
a college (that he did not attend as he wanted to study painting in
Mumbai).
He went to the Sir J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai against his father's wishes. His friend since childhood, Baburao Sadwelkar, was already a student there. It was in Mumbai that Arun met many aspiring artists---among them the now widely acclaimed members of the Bombay 'Progressive Artists' group of the 1950s. His long association with Rampart Row and the 'Kala Ghoda' square began at that time. The Artists' Aid Fund Centre was located on this street. It was a meeting place for artists and a clearing house for their works. M. F. Hussain, K. Ara, F.N. Souza, Gade, S.H. Raza, V.S. Gaitonde, and many others were regulars at the Centre just diagonally across the street from the Jehangir Art Gallery. In the vicinity were the David Sassoon Library, the Army and Navy Building, the Elphinstone College, the Institute of Science, the Cowasjee Jehangir Hall, and of course the Prince of Wales Museum. Just round the corner was the University of Bombay and its Rajabai Tower. This is still, architecturally, the most British and European part of the city. Arun's favourite restaurant for five decades---The Wayside Inn---was also located here. His Kala Ghoda Poems are 'centred' here. Kala
Ghoda or Black Horse was an equestrian statue of King Edward VII that
was installed here in 1879 and has long since been removed and kept in
the Rani Jijamata Udyan as the erstwhile Victoria Gardens is
renamed as a part of the exercise to rewrite the city's history by
erasing names associated with the British Raj.
This part of Mumbai had, in Arun Kolatkar, its best artistic and literary witness for the entire last half of the 20th century. It is arguable that in both Marathi and English, Arun Kolatkar is a poet of the urban culturescape of Mumbai, though the entire sequence of poems Jejuri is an exception. In English Arun's first long poem The Boat Ride and the Kala Ghoda Poems are again his reading of Mumbai, in some ways the city of his destiny and his poetic habitat. I learnt about Arun's cancer
the very day his CAT scan revealed his malignancy and his bleak
prognosis. Viju and I were to visit Mumbai the next day for the release
of a Marathi poet's new book and this had been publicised. Ashok
Shahane, Arun's publisher and our common friend since long, called me
late at night.
"Are you going to be in Mumbai tomorrow?"
"Yes. Why?"
" Don't go back to Pune without seeing Arun."
" Is something the matter?"
"I can't tell you that. Don't tell Arun that I asked you to see him."
" What's the matter? Is something wrong with his health?"
" Please don't tell him or anybody else that I
told you. He's got cancer of the intestines. Doctors don't give him
more than a couple of weeks."
" O my God!"
I had planned to make a short film on Arun. I had
proposed it to the Sahitya Akademi. But I had no idea I'd get this kind
of news about Arun. It was the proverbial bolt from the blue.
The next day, Viju and I visited Arun at his
home in Prabhadevi. Soonu and Arun both seemed calm. We were just
having tea and some small talk when suddenly a lot of Arun's grand
nieces and nephews arrived with Arun's nephew Sanjay. They were on
their way to the Aquarium and the Gateway of India and had stopped by
to visit their monumental grandpa. We left soon.
I returned to Pune determined to launch and
complete the film before Arun's condition worsened. As the formalities
of script approval and bank guarantee necessary to make a contract with
the Sahitya Akademi would have taken weeks, I decided to borrow the
money and make the film on my own, hoping that the Akademi would
purchase it later.
I asked Viju to contact all the people we knew who had known Arun since his Kolhapur days and list sources of information. As a sheer coincidence, Arun's Bhijki Vahi was nominated for the Keshav Kothavale Puraskar to be given to him in Pune and Arun suggested that he would rather accept it at the hands of a fellow poet---me. I asked Arun if I could record him for my film on
him, starting from the award ceremony in Pune at which Arun would give
a reading of his work. I knew Arun would refuse to be interviewed but
would not mind me recording his readings.
Thus we rolled the film that was a race against
time and for me a very stressed movement through fifty years of
personal memories of a very close relationship.
It was in 1984 in Bhopal
that I had my first opportunity to make films ( in the video format
that I had not handled till then) on poets, writers, and artists. I was
then Director of Vagarth ---the library and centre of Indian
poetry at Bharat Bhavan, India's pioneering multi-arts centre. There
were three other centres at Bharat Bhavan: Roopankar ( the visual arts), Rangmandal (the theatre arts); and Anhad (music).
I wanted to document my contemporaries, record their presence as it were. Among the several films I made there, two stand out in my mind as the most successful. The films I made on the Hindi poet Shamsher Bahadur Singh and the Bangla poet Shakti Chattopadhyaya captured their living presence as they recited their characteristic poems in a visual ambience I created by relating them to the location of filming. Even then, I had plans of making films on Arun Kolatkar and Namdeo Dhasal, two of my Marathi contemporaries I consider outstanding by world standards. But my short tenure at Bhopal was further shortened by the industrial disaster in that city on December 3-4, 1984 after which everybody's life in Bhopal underwent a strange change. Making a film on Arun as he was dying was itself an excruciating experience. The night I was supposed to present the Keshav Kothavale Award to Arun for his collection of Marathi poems Bhijki Vahi was
also when my film would start rolling.
Working on borrowed money (and time) was the least of my pressures. My real anxiety was Arun's day-to-day condition. As the allopaths offered no hope whatever, and as Soonu has great faith in homeopathy, Arun opted for homeopathic treatment. Ratnakar Sohoni (Ratan), a protege of Arun, was by his side all the time. Ratan administered him his daily injection, drove him around in his car, and communicated with the rest of us through his mobile phone. The Kolatkars had refused to install a phone at home. When they needed to call someone, they would use the nearest public phone booth. Even during Arun's last illness, we reached him through Ratan or passed messages to him through Ashok Shahane. Our very first shooting
schedule in Pune was tricky and complicated as it was meant to cover
Arun's public reading of his selected Marathi poems after the
presentation of the award to him by me and after speeches by the
members of the jury and Majestic Prakashan, on whose behalf the annual
award is given. I would be with Arun on the stage and not with my
cinematographer, Milind Jog. Viju and Babu ( Sandip Sonavane, our
Production Controller) were to work with our still photographer,
Sandesh Bhandare and with Milind. I had briefed them in detail about
the kind of images we were looking for, and Viju would direct them to
identify Arun's close friends and relatives.
By this time, all Arun's friends and relatives knew that his illness was terminal and this would perhaps be his last public appearance in Pune. This created a special atmosphere in Majestic Prakashan's bookstore where people met before the award presentation ceremony on the terrace of the same building in Narayan Peth, in the heart of the 'inner city' of Pune. It was a solemn occasion for
Arun's friends and relatives.
His brothers and sisters---to whom Arun was a stranger for the larger part of their lives---were in the audience. His friends and professional colleagues were there, as were those who can be called his proteges, people who learnt some of his craft or honed their skills under his benevolently critical eye. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, whom Arun had summoned from Allahabad to help him edit his unpublished work, was there. (We interviewed Arvind on camera after the award presentation.) Ashok Shahane and his wife Rekha, Ashok Kelkar, Vrindavan and Raghu Dandavate, Madhav Bhagwat, and other friends associated with Marathi little magazines were there. Some of his colleagues and former apprentices in advertising were there. Avinash Gupte, Dilip Bhende, Ratnakar Sohoni... We were making a video documentation of a historic event and Viju guided the two photographers by anticipating the emotions on the faces she asked them to follow...It somehow worked. Before the reading, Arun
asked me what poems I would prefer him to read as I would use the
recording for my film. When he read them from a book, I held the
microphone in one hand and tried to ward off the flying insects
attracted by lights with the other. It was quite an acrobatic feat for
Milind and Sandesh to keep my face out of the frame as they were
strictly instructed. My editor, Mahesh Khare and I had a hard time
cutting the videotape.
On the whole, though, we had good footage on our
first day of shooting. We had some great close ups of Arun alone and
with some of his close friends; and we had his reading with a
responsive, intensely focussed audience, at a rare public event.
Arun's declining resilience
was not the only constraint our filming faced. Soonu, Arun's wife, was
adamant that we avoided shooting with Arun at his home in Prabhadevi.
It is a fact that Arun and Soonu lived in a very small and congested
space, about the size of an average room that was divided into living
area, kitchenette, bath and toilet. It could not take more than three
visitors in addition to the couple that made their home there.
At the same time, it said more about Arun's spartan surroundings and his stoic attitude than a thousand words could convey. That was Arun's home; without it, Arun would be seen as homeless and decontextualised; and the whole purpose of my film was to help the audience contextualise the poet and feel his unique human presence that illuminates his poetry. The other thing Soonu was stubbornly opposed to was
showing herself in any frame of the film, even on a public occasion
such as the award ceremony and Arun's public reading that we shot in
Pune.
In a documentary film, one does not remove meaning from an existing situation. Here, we were asked not to even refer to, visually, Soonu's constant presence by Arun's side in what were going to be his last days in the world. But the last and most
unexpected insistence about what the film should not contain came from
Arun himself.
My first version of the film in its final cut used a rare studio-recorded song written, composed, and sung by Arun in English: I am a poor man. It is now rare archival material in the possession of Vrindavan Dandavate and Arun's brother Makrand Kolatkar. It was the high point of my film whose soundtrack had a Marathi bhajan sung by Arun's 'guru ' Balvantbuva who inspired Chirimiri. Arun's English song blended with Balvantbuva's Marathi bhajan in a way similar to the way Arun's pop American idiom fuses with his Bhakti inheritance. Arun called me in Pune asking me to please cut the song out one whole week after I sent him the VCD of my final cut and barely 24 hours before I was supposed to screen it in Delhi for the Sahitya Akademi's approval. It forced me to redesign the entire film and made me feel uncomfortable because Arun behaved as though he was my client and not a critical friend giving me well-reasoned advice. Viju made a list of people to
be interviewed who could shed light on different periods and phases
of Arun's life. For this she consulted Arun's brother Sudhir whom
we have known since the late 1950s. Sudhir is just three years or so
younger than Arun and has shared a childhood with him unlike Arun's
other, younger siblings. Sudhir is a poet himself and lived for some
time with Arun and his first wife, Darshan Chhabda. After talking to
Sudhir, we interviewed Arun's uncle 'Nana' who was then 98 years old
but had a clear recall and an even clearer voice when he spoke about
the young Arun's prodigious artistic talent. We also interviewed Arun's
schoolmate, Madhav Bhagwat. Arun's brother Makrand who visited Jejuri with
Arun and is mentioned in a poem in the sequence by that name.
On Viju's interviewees' list were Arun's close friends Vrindavan Dandavate, Ashok Shahane, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Adil Jussawala, Kiran Nagarkar, Tulsi Vatsa, Ratnakar Sohoni and his first wife and our close friend, Darshan Chhabda. Darshan and Arun were
married, I think, in 1953 and they broke up around 1966 when Arun
had already decided to marry Soonu. As my friendship with Arun dates
back to 1954 when he was just married, I have memories of their poor,
struggling, but happy years of early marriage.
Ever since I started dating Viju in 1956, I had told Darshan and Arun about her. Viju actually met them in 1958. We met at Darshan's flat ( it was actually her brother's) at Cadell Road, Shivaji Park every weekend as Vrindavan Dandavate recalls in the film. This was just about the time Arun began to taste
success in his new career as an advertising artist. From 1953 to 1957,
the couple had been through many adventures and hardships, though
Arun's poetry was in full flow then. They spent a spell of time in
Madras in and out of temporary jobs. Finally, they returned to Bombay
and Arun turned from fine art to commercial art to make money with a
vengeance.
Viju and I went to Ethiopia in October 1960
and returned only at the end of July 1963 after finishing my teaching
contract there. So I lost live touch with my friends in Bombay for
nearly three years.
Upon our return, I found that Arun was the rising star art director in advertising. I also noticed that he had started drinking, at times during working hours. Over the next few years, Arun not only became
increasingly an alcoholic but also started showing violent and
aggressive tendencies that one had never found in him before. He
started visiting us regularly as most of his other friends started
avoiding him.
He would often arrive in a cab, dead drunk, and with no money to pay the cabbie. It was difficult to handle him. Our son, Ashay, was very small then and he was frightened by Arun's visits and his outrageously violent behaviour. As soon as Arun sought and got a divorce from
Darshan (it was by mutual consent), he became more sober and sociable
again. After Soonu and he got married, he became almost disciplined,
though our meetings somehow became less frequent as our career paths
diverged.
I met Arun in downtown Mumbai. He rarely visited
our home. We would occasionally visit him at his Colaba residence in a
part of a luxurious apartment in Bakhtavar---a classy address.
Arun's routine had not changed. He still bought books and music, met his regular friends at The Wayside Inn, and visited the library of The Asiatic Society of Bombay. He had also started studying and practising the pakhawaj and for a guide he had the well-known pakhawaj maestro, Arjun Shejwal.Through Arjun, Arun met Balvantbuva and that seems to have changed his life profoundly. This may seem like a
digression. But the film I was making was shaped by my attempt to read
a friend of nearly a half century who was terminally ill and fighting
for his life. The theme statement of the film came to me as its title
sequence based on one of my favourite poems by him, the Marathi poem Menbatti -2 ( Candle-II).
I sketched its frames for my cinematographer, Milind Jog, and my still photographer, Sandesh Bhandare long before I recorded Arun reading the poem. I translated the poem into English and read it myself off-screen over Arun's Marathi reading. As the reading faded out on the soundtrack, I faded in Ghalib's immortal ghazal ---Aah ko chahiye ek umra asar hone tak in Kundan Lal Sehgal's poignant rendering. The Candle was Arun's life for me, its moth-like trapeze acts of vacillation towards its flame and away from it, and its last flutter that I was trying to capture---like another moth capturing another flame. During the course of
gathering material for the film, we made an appointment with Darshan
Chhabda, Arun's first wife and our friend of five decades. Darshan
lives with her brother Bal, the well-known painter, but spends her
whole working day in a flat owned by her family near the Kennedy
Bridge, Opera House. The building is one of those Mumbai buildings that
could come crashing down any time.
Arun is described by the media as 'reclusive' but that adjective would fit Darshan perfectly. Since they were divorced in the late 1960s, Darshan has gradually become more and more a private person. At one time, she had the makings of a writer and was a very talented painter as well. When we met her for an interview, our cameraman Milind Jog was with us; but we sent him away to join the rest of our crew as soon as Darshan politely declined to be recorded. Instead, she opened her little treasure box of manuscripts, photographs, journals, diaries, and letters from a 'lost' period in Arun's life to which there are very few living witnesses now and about which Arun himself would not want to talk. Darshan handed over to Viju and me the whole lot, and in it were poems that could not be found anywhere else. During the last weeks of Arun's life, I passed the poems on to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Arun 'approved' some of them for inclusion in the volume of unpublished poems and translations that Arvind is now editing and Ashok Shahane will publish in 2006. Poets, like
all other human beings, have medical histories. Bodies accompany minds
and vice versa. Depending on your philosophical inclination, you may be
puzzled by the body-mind relationship. Our more mysterious organ, the brain, separates us from other forms of life, and the self-awareness we possess is so unique that at times it seems to dwell elsewhere, independent from our bodies. Yet we have a history only because we are born as a body, grow as a body, decline as a body, fall as a body, and die as nobody. I lost my only son, Ashay, just ten months before Arun died. Ashay died of asphyxiation, all alone in our flat in Pune. That was almost at the end of November 2003( Ashay died on November 29). Viju and I were then visiting Germany. We could get a flight back with great difficulty 48 hours after we received the news. ashay's only child Yohul, our grandson, was barely 18. He had to rush from Mumbai and handle the tragedy and its traumatic aftermath by himself, though relatives and friends rallied around him. When Viju and I arrived at the Mumbai airport, most of our close friends and some relatives came to receive us at the airport. Arun was conspicuously missing. Arun and Soonu visited us to offer their condolence weeks later. We knew Arun wouldn't have the nerve. He had known Ashay since we brought him to India from Ethiopia as a two-year old child. Arun had a very special relationship with Ashay. Ashay had a talent for drawing and painting from the time he could hold a pencil or a crayon. Arun noticed it as we did; and he watched Ashay work, asked to see his work, and spoke with him about it. As Ashay grew up, he developed an interest in photography, then cinematography, then scriptwriting---in a continuous progesssion. He also secretly wrote poems and songs, and publihed book reviews and other prose. What Arun shared with Ashay was love of music and books---of which both were avid collectors and afcianadoes of whatever that caught their attention. I love books and music, too. But I am not as fanatically obsessed with themes, subjects, historical contexts, persons, exotic places and people, bizarre and intriguing events, crime, science fiction, and popular culture as Arun and Ashay were. Whenever Arun visited us in recent years, he would see Ashay in his room and ask to see his latest paintings and drawings, his new acquisitions such as books, CDs, audiocassettes, and so on. Ever since we moved to Pune ( after the Bhopal industrial disaster of 1984 in which Ashay irreversibly lost 60% of his lung function overnight), Arun visited us far more regularly than we saw him on our quick visits to Mumbai. A majority of Arun's brothers and sisters live in Pune, and being the eldest of his siblings, after his parents' death, Arun used to frequently fill in as the elder patriarch. He had moved away from his family after asserting his independence and choosing fine art as a career against the wishes of his father 'Tatya' ( Balkrishna Kolhatkar) way back in the early 1950s. But he kept in touch with his siblings, his cousins, his mother, his aunts, and his uncles. Even after they were reconciled, Tatya and Arun could not freely communicate with each other, as often happens between fathers and sons---especially sons considered 'prodigal' or wayward. Arun's chosen family was his friends and their families. And I suspect he enjoyed playing an avuncular role : benevolent, indulgent, and protective. Arun treated Ashay as more than a nephew or a young person in the family. He treated him as a younger friend and, I believe, as a sort of spiritual ward. As Ashay's father, I avoided patronising Ashay. I now realize that Arun and some other friends answered Ashay's need to be emotionally and morally supported in his artistic career, especially as he saw things differently from his contemporaries who were brought up in a typical Indian family. Ashay was born outside India in Ethiopia, and had spent three years of his adolescence in the United States in the mid-1970s. He felt he was not understood by most people in India. Arun was one of the few who not only understood him, but also gave him the signals of acceptance approval that he craved for. Ashay played one or several roles in most of my films until he was suddenly gone. Viju and I couldn't help imagining him getting intensely involved in the film on Arun. A hypersensitive introvert to whom every assignment meant a matter of life-and-death, Ashay would have been in a state of endless turmoil during the making of a film on Arun. Since the Bhopal disaster, Ashay's world view was completely altered. He became more compassionate but also more pessimistic about the outcome of any human life, starting from his own. He would have seen himself in Arun if he watched him slowly die and he would have poured out all he had in him to capture Arun's images in a poignant perspective to express his own feelings for Arun's unique and fleeting presence. It would have been both a torture and a release for him, as it was for all of us who knew Arun and loved him : a cathartic experience of self-recognition. We felt Ashay's presence throughout the various stages of production. How would Ashay have handled it? It would have become a different film. Ashay would have tried to appropriate the film in his own way and there would have been a tug of war between us. I would have tried to assert my vision and Ashay would have sulked, fretted and fumed; at times he would have exploded. But the result would have been stunningly different, as it happened with my film Godam in which Ashay got involved at more levels than his professional duty as Govind Nihalani's lighting cameraman and chief assistant. Ashay worked with me on every post-production detail and on the final cut in particular. Arun braved many hardships after coming to Bombay from Kolhapur. His confrontation with his father about his career choice injured his pride but he continued with determination on his lonely path. His childhood friend from Kolhapur, Baburao Sadwelkar was already a bright student at the ir J.J. School of Art, and it seemed he was set on a career as an academic painter who would be happy to become an art educator. Indeed, some of the finest painters and draughtsmen produced by the J.J. School continued in their Alma Mater as teachers of Western visual arts skills and techniques learnt from European art history and applied those to create Indian works of art on Indian subjects ranging from landscape painting, portraiture, mythology and history, and so on, that were new genres for Indian audiences not yet used to the idea of public art galleries, museums, and exhibitions of competivive work by newcomers in annual shows. Arun's course was different. He was fiercely independent. He wanted to explore poetry and painting to express his individual vision and ideas. He was a non-conformist, though he was not an iconoclast. Nor was he an ideologue and polemicist with an agenda and a manifesto who would band with likeminded poets and artists to launch a movement. He also wanted to see the world for himself with his own sensibility and intellectual acumen. He would rather practice than preach. He would neither be a leader nor a follower. He did not wear his concerns on his sleeve. He would observe the same things again and again, engage with them silently, almost surreptitiously, making notes, jotting phrases, sketching and drawing. Two of his friends in his student days in Bombay were Ambadas ( the now internationally famous Indian painter who is a naturalized citizen of Norway) and the maverick, self-taught artist Bandu Waze who was perhaps the most original and daring abstract painter with immense energy, talent, and conviction that many of his academically cultivated colleagues lacked. The public never saw Waze's work: his charcoal, crayon and pastel works, or poster colour paintings in cheap medium size or small sketchbooks. But the few of us who had the privilege of seeing his work were awed by his demonic genius. I shared with Bandu Waze a love of Tukaram's poetry and of Indian classical music. It was Waze who led me to my 'guru' in Indian music---Pandit Sharatchandra Arolkar, a reclusive singer who was among the greatest of 20th century composer-singers. For some time, Arun and Bandu shared his quarters with Ambadas, by the way a Dalit. They had no money and lived in semi-starvation or on the small handouts given to them by Ambadas. No 'modern' painters could live on painting in Bombay in the 1950s. If they sold a painting to the handful of Europeans who understood art, the prices would be less than four figure sums, often not exceeding Rs. 500. Of course, Rs 500 could purchase 250 grams of gold then---in today's terms Rs 7000x25! You could eat usal pav or shorwa roti for a rupee and manage a day's expenses in about five rupees. Which meant that you had to sell one painting to feed yourself for about three months if you did not buy cheap contraband booze, smoked only if you could bum a cigarette or share a few drags with friends, and were never tempted to eat mutton, chicken, or even eggs. Artists seldom live like that. The Jehangir Art Gallery and The Artists' Aid Fund Centre on Rampart Row were the only galleries in downtown Bombay in the 1950s. This is the Kala Ghoda area that's now the famous literary location associated with Arun Kolatkar, the poet. Two other galleries that came up were Keku and Khorshed Gandhi's Gallery Chemould and Kali Pundole's Pundole Art Gallery next to Pyrkes Restaurant at Flora Fountain. 'The Club' or The Artists' Aid Fund Centre on Rampart Row where members of the Bombay Progressive Artists Group and some who were not members of that group assembled every day, hoping for a buyer to turn up. The place used to remind me of an orphanage more than an art gallery. But I was only a teenager witnessing the down side of an artist's life in Bombay. It is here that Arun first saw Darshan Chhabda and was smitten by her. He made the first move and introduced himself. He proposed to her in a letter he wrote from Kolhapur; and she was only surprised. But when they met again in Bombay, an intense affair started and rapidly culminated in a civil marriage opposed by both their families for different reasons. This was towards the end of 1953, just months before Arun and I met and became friends. ARUN AND I : THE ROUTES OF LIFE AND THE ROOTS OF POETRY I knew nothing about Arun;'s childhood and his adolescence except from his occasional remarks and rare reminiscences. He could say the same about me. Both Darshan and Arun treated me sometimes as though I was a kid brother and often as though I was an enfant terrible in their newly started 'family'. Bandu Waze and Arun had been very close. But after Arun married Darshan, Waze continued to live with them at Malad, and I sensed that Arun was troubled by this intrusion on his private space and Waze's growing informality and friendship with Darshan. Arun was possessive and insecure. The only money they had came perhaps from Darshan's mother. Though both her brothers, Surjit and Bal, doted on their only sister, Darshan knew how proud and sensitive Arun was and she would do nothing that was likely to make him feel humiliated. Arun's differences with Tatya, his father, alienated them. Just before Darshan and Arun married, Arun was to appear for his art diploma examination. Arun felt confident that until he got his diploma and started working, Darshan could live with his parents who were in Satara then. The Kolatkars had a Hindu extended family living in an atmosphere of rare rapport and mutual understanding. Tatya was the patriarch who headed it. Arun was his oldest male child. In Kolhapur, his younger brother Nana and his family lived in the same house. Their sisters children often lived with them or at least frequently visited them. All the Kolatkar cousins grew up together more like siblings than at a distance as in nuclear families branching off from the massive trunk of a common family tree. Tatya was an officer in the education department and his work took him on tours of the entire region he supervised. When Arun and Darshan got off the bus from Mumbai in Satara, arun did not know if Tatya was in town. He had planned to leave Darshan in the care of his mother and return to Mumbai to get his diploma. He would then get back and Darshan and he would get married and start their life together in Mumbai or wherever. He received a huge jolt just near the Satara bus station. Tatya met the young couple. He was surprised to find Arun with a young woman. He was even more surprised when Arun told him of his plan to leave Darshan with the family in Satara until he returned from Mumbai to marry her. " You will do nothing of that sort, " he told his son, " Take the young lady back to Mumbai right now. She stays with her family." I can only imagine Arun's reaction. His faith in his father, if not in his idea of his family ---as a liberal household living in amity and with mutual understanding---must have been absolutely shattered. He also must have felt humiliated as this happened in Darshan's presence. But though he must have felt broken and embittered, he did return to Mumbai by the very next bus. Their honeymoon seemed to have ended before they even got married. To regain his honour and to assert his independence, Arun was determined to exercise his only option. Darshan and he returned to Mumbai and registered their civil marriage as soon as they could. Even the Chhabdas were not very happy about Darshan's decision to get married to a twenty-two year old bohemian artist who had not yet got his art diploma or sold a single work. They thought the couple could have waited. ( TO BE CONTINUED) |
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