Devdan Chaudhuri

Debate | It’s Not Exaggeration to Say the British Codified the Language We Know as ‘Hindi’ Now

The initiative of Scottish linguist and the employee of East India Company, John Gilchrist and the Fort William College in Calcutta have been overlooked in a recent essay.

Imre Bangha of Oxford University, in a piece published on The Wire on September 12, 2020, referred to my 2019 essay – ‘Hindi was devised by a Scottish linguist of the East India Company – it can never be India’s National Language’ – in the very first paragraph.

Bangha introduced my essay by saying ‘those who resent the political role of Hindi in 20th century nationalism’: a comment that is unfortunately misplaced. My essay was a reaction to the Hindi imposition drive in the 21st century by the current Hindutva regime that wants to enforce Hindi as our ‘National Language’. This ‘social engineering mission’ is not acceptable to the non-Hindi speaking regions of India.

My essay argues on the line that India does not need a singular national language and provides the reasons for it. I was not resenting any political role of Hindi in 20th century nationalism. Bangha must already know that Vande Mataram – the rallying cry of 20th century Indian nationalism and the freedom movement – appeared in a novel written in Bengali, not Hindi.

Bangha’s explicit pro-Hindi sentimentalism – that makes him misunderstand, or even overlook, evidential facts – is revealed further when he bypasses the all-critical role of John Gilchrist and Fort William College in Calcutta, by focusing much of his piece upon comments made by George A. Grierson, and his ‘unclear’ ideas about Hindi being ‘a language, a speech and then a dialect.’

Bangha goes to discuss Rekhta and the Nagari script that no one has claimed to have been devised by the British, who only played a pivotal role in popularising it.

Also read: Pushing Hindi as Politics, Not Hindi as Language

Bangha concludes his piece by saying, ‘Although the colonial claim that the British created a new language – a language appropriate to the modern needs – has taken deep roots in contemporary thinking, it is only partially justified…the British created a highly Sanskritsied style of Khari boli perceiving it to be a Hindu speech variety.’

The last line only supports what was pointed out in my essay: the colonial British bifurcated secular Hindustani into two separate modern languages for Hindus and Muslims.

Gilchrist also claimed the same – as quoted in my essay – ‘bifurcation of Khariboli into two forms – the Hindustani language with Khariboli as the root – resulted in two languages (Hindi and Urdu), each with its own character and script.’

“In other words” – what I wrote in my essay – “what was Hindustani language was segregated into Hindi and Urdu (written in Devanagari and Persian scripts), codified and formalised.”

Blanconi; Dr John Borthwick Gilchrist (1759-1841); UCL Art Museum; Photo: Public domain

And this was achieved through the initiative of the Scottish linguist and the employee of East India Company, John Gilchrist (1759-1841) and the Fort William College in Calcutta (1800-1854).

This pivotal piece of history in modern Hindi’s origin is glossed over by Bangha who says, “Hindustani was standardised into its single modern grammar by Urdu intellectuals in the 18th century and by print culture and Hindi intellectuals in the 19th century. Although Fort William College also had its share in it, claiming its entire agency is exaggeration.”

By saying the above, Bangha completely omits the fact that the very first printed book in modern Hindi – Devanagari or Nagari type-set – was not written by someone with a surname of Sharma or Tripathi, but was written by John Gilchrist.

And it was a work titled ‘A Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language, or Part Third of Volume First, of a System of Hindoostanee Philology’, Calcutta: Chronicle Press, 1796.

The first two volumes of the grammar were included in the very first work that Gilchrist published: ‘A Dictionary: English and Hindoostanee’, Calcutta: Stuart and Cooper, 1787-90.

The grammar of modern Hindi – as we know it to be now – was ultimately standardised by John Gilchrist of Fort William College.

In order to popularise Hindi, Gilchrist recruited and paid native writers to produce works in accordance to that grammar.

It was also Fort William College that got these works – vernacular textbooks, dictionaries and literary creations – published by the ‘Serampore Mission Press’ – one of the earliest printing presses in India, and got them widely disseminated all across India.

These inconvertible facts make it unreasonable to say – like Bangha has said in his piece – that the ‘entire agency’ of the college’s role is an ‘exaggeration’.

One also needs to point out that the Devanagari or Nagari type-face or font was developed by the Orientalist, typographer and founding member of The Asiatic Society, Charles Wilkins and one of the employees of Wilkin’s printing press in Calcutta, Panchanan Karmakar: a Bengali born in Hooghly district. The reference to this is print expert Arun Bapurao Naik, son of legendary Bapurao Naik, the author of Indian Bookprinting and other notable works.

Fort William College in Calcutta – under Gilchrist’s leadership – became a centre for both Hindi and Urdu prose. It started within the premises of Fort William, in the location, where the Raj Bhavan – or the present Governor’s residence – was built (between 1799 to 1803) by Governor-General Wellesley.

So the college was moved in 1800 to another building – originally designed by Thomas Lyon in 1777 – in the nearby area, now known as the Dalhousie Square or the B.B.D Bag.

Several structural changes were made to the building to accommodate a new hostel, several halls (for examination and lectures) and four libraries dedicated to the cause of Hindi, Urdu and other languages.

The institution gathered writers from all over India to compose Hindi, Urdu and other vernacular texts; and hence, even after it moved out of the B.B.D Bag building in 1830, the 150-meter long premises of the former college still continues to be known as the “Writers’ building”: a famous landmark of Calcutta; the old secretariat building of the State of West Bengal and the actual historical birthplace of modern Hindi.

Devdan Chaudhuri is the author of the novel Anatomy of Life. He is also a poet whose works have featured in Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians published by Sahitya Akademi; a short story writer; an essayist on politics and culture and one of the contributing editors of The Punch Magazine. He lives in Kolkata.

What a Buddhist ‘Mudra’ in Da Vinci’s Christ Tells Us of Cross-Cultural Influences in the Ancient World

Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi suggests the cross-fertilisation of ideas and practices that we take for granted today has a much longer history.

Members of Christie’s staff view Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi painting. Credit: Reuters

Smashing the record for any work of art sold at an auction, the long-lost painting of Jesus Christ – Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci – has sold at Christie’s in New York for $ 450.3 million: nearly half a billion dollars.

Salvator Mundi was painted around 1500 and was presumed to be lost until early this century. It was consigned to Dmitry Rybolovlev – a Russian fertiliser billionaire – who had acquired it from a Paris-based dealer Yves Bouvier for $127m, who had, in turn, acquired it from Sotheby’s in a private sale in 2013 for $50m less.

The price escalation of the painting from $77m in 2013 to $450.3m in 2017 is unprecedented and astonishing.

Christie’s described the painting of Christ holding a crystal orb in his left hand and raising his right hand in benediction as “the biggest discovery of the 21st century”.

The auction house refused to reveal the identity of the collector or even indicate which region of the world the collector comes from. Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti said, “I cannot say if he or she will want to be public.”

However, some critics were quick to question the attribution of the painting to da Vinci and a controversy has erupted about the ‘much restored’ painting as an alleged ‘fake’. Several articles – by the naysayers from around the art world – are being published in the western press which delve into the finer details of the argument, and the matter is far from over.

But what intrigues me in da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi – we will have to hold the painting as genuine until proven otherwise – is the gesture of Jesus’s right hand, described as ‘benediction.’ It is a Buddhist mudra – ardhapataka, meaning ‘half-flag’.

Ardhapataka, orthodox Christianity and Sanatan Dharma

Mudra in Sanskrit means ‘seal’, ‘mark’ or ‘gesture’. It is common to Sanatan Dharma (especially Hinduism and Buddhism) that has been deeply imbibed in culture, including symbolic iconography, dance forms, yoga, tantra and martial arts.

Some mudras involve the entire body, while most are performed with hands and fingers. They are spiritual gestures which are meant to channel prana – the inner physical and psychic energy – for specific purposes and effects.

I have a friend, Bibhudev Misra. He went through the much sought-after grind of IIT, IIM and a stint of several years in UK and US as an IT consultant, before he quit it all and returned to Kolkata for good.

Now he is completely devoted to his passion – myths, symbols and mysteries. He travels around the world to do independent research and writes articles on his blog. He ventures into specific topics and gathers meticulous evidence which challenges the establishmentarian or ‘mainstream’ perceptions and narratives.

I spoke to Misra about the ardhapataka gesture in da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, and he guided me to his newest article, that through an uncanny coincidence, was about the very topic of my enquiry: Yoga Mudras in Orthodox Christian Art: Does it indicate a Hindu-Buddhist Influence?

In the article, Misra discusses similarities between the hand gestures in several orthodox Christian art displays of Jesus and his apostles with the various mudras associated with Buddhism and Hinduism.

The following photo is from Bibhu’s article where Christ – in an image from Ravenna, Italy – appears to be displaying the ardhapataka mudra – familiar to Buddhism (and also Bharatnatyam) which suggests the hand gesture of Jesus in da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi is not something unusual or a bolt from the blue, but rather in line with how Christ was depicted elsewhere in medieval Europe.

Christ’s mosaic in Ravenna, Italy displaying the ardhapataka mudra. Credit: bibhudevmisra.com

(One should note parenthetically that like Shakyamuni Buddha – a ‘brown’ sage from the Indian subcontinent who is depicted with features typical of an East Asian in China, Japan, Korea and the ASEAN countries – Jesus Christ is also depicted as a white Caucasian when in reality he was a brown West Asian).

Links between monastic tradition of Buddhism and Orthodox Christianity

How might the influence of Indian mudras have percolated to medieval Christian art and to the painting by da Vinci?

To answer this question, it is essential that the ‘unspoken’ links between Orthodox Christianity and the Buddhist monastic tradition are spoken about.

In order to do that, I need to tell the story of my travel to Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai – one of the oldest monasteries of Orthodox Christianity that still practices the original form of the teachings.

St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai. Credit: Devdan Chaudhuri

In August 2010 – the hottest month of every year in the region – I braved over 45°C mid-afternoon temperatures and travelled to Egypt and to the Sinai – the peninsula that lies between Egypt and Israel. For the Sinai trip, I was joined by a friend from Tel Aviv, who arrived from the opposite direction via the Israeli border town of Eilat.

The Sinai region looks much like Ladakh – bare brown hills and mountains with greyish and reddish hue, without any moisture and greenery, but alluring and mystifying.

The splendid road to Saint Catherine’s Monastery is stark, beautiful and dangerous. There were incidents of bandit attacks on tourists on the desolate rolling highway – passing through arid plains between barren hilly terrains; with no human habitation for miles – and terrorist attacks by radical Salafists in the sensitive region were already a menace. The most ‘infamous’ of the attacks was the 2005 Sharm El Sheikh bombings – that targeted a market and a hotel – which made prime time news all over the world.

Highway to monastery. Credit: Devdan Chaudhuri

There has been a series of attacks – on a smaller scale, ever since 2005 – which didn’t make world news, but were known to everyone on the tiny peninsula that connects the two giant continents of Africa and Asia.

We hired a vehicle to go to Saint Catherine’s Monastery, which was few hours away from our isolated location. The rental car company from Nuweiba charged an astronomical amount for the day trip due to the security risks that the trip entailed. But we were already determined to visit the monastery, even after my friend’s impassioned negotiation in Arabic failed to get us any discount.

Sinai is a long way away from Kolkata – it involves three flights and a spectacular road trip from Sharm El Sheikh; I was on ancient Biblical land; I wasn’t prepared to return home without taking a look at the fabled ‘Burning Bush’ of Moses.

Saint Catherine’s Monastery (officially the ‘Sacred Monastery of God-Trodden Mount Sinai’) lies at the mouth of a gorge at the foot of Mount Sinai where Moses received the Ten Commandments. It is one of the oldest working Christian monasteries in the world – controlled by the Church of Sinai, part of the wider Eastern Orthodox Church – and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Chapel of the Burning Bush. Credit: Devdan Chaudhuri

The monastery also contains one of the oldest continually-operating libraries which recorded the ancient monastic life in the region before the monastery was built by the Byzantine emperor, Justinian (who ruled rom 527-565 CE) enclosing the pre-existing Chapel of the Burning Bush (also known as ‘Saint Helen’s Chapel) that was ordered to be built by Empress Consort Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, at the site where Moses is supposed to have seen the burning bush.

The monastery was fortified by thick stone walls; it has never been sacked and a mosque was also created – by using the existing structures – inside the monastery walls during the Fatimid Caliphate (909-1171 CE) that is used for special occasions. The site is sacred to Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

The original ‘burning bush’ is believed to have been transplanted several metres away from the Chapel and its successor – protected by a stone wall – is tended by the monks who live in the monastery.

The bush is a native of the region. It is a ‘holy bramble’ of the rose family – Rubus sancta – and is known for its extreme longevity. However, the monastery’s bush neither blooms nor gives any fruit.

There were around 50 Orthodox Christian monks in the monastery when I had visited, who followed the ‘purest and the oldest form of the teachings’ in accordance with the apostles.

By visiting the monastery and closely observing certain characteristics, I was struck with wonder when I saw a resemblance – at least to me as a lay person – between the practices of the Orthodox Christian monks and the monastic practices of the Buddhist monks, who emerged 500 years before Christ.

The characteristics of Saint Catherine’s Monastery – asceticism, meditation, incense sticks, rosary beads, library to preserve ancient texts, colourful wall paintings which tell a story and secluded monastic living – resemble the ancient Buddhist monasteries which I have visited in the mountainous regions of India, Bhutan and Tibet. Many of the practices are similar, even though the faith differs.

Could it be that in our ancient world – whose deep history we don’t know, and may not ever know – the influence of the Buddhist monastic traditions percolated into ‘the original, the oldest and the purest’ practices of the Eastern Orthodox Church?

Could that be how the mudras were also imbibed, and then depicted in art?

The symbolic meaning of Salvator Mundi

When one’s perspective is influenced by certain experiences and specific knowledge, one isn’t surprised by the hand gesture by Jesus in da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi.

The truth of the past often becomes clear in the future when intentional and the unintentional omissions, mistakes, prejudices and interpretations are rectified by new generations. Astute research – with an open and impartial mind that seeks nothing but the truth – may lead to newer discoveries which will finally prove or disprove the theory, once and for all.

But there is no doubt that a cross-fertilisation of ideas and practices went on in our ancient world which we are only beginning to understand in the 21st century. Our ancient world was as open to cross-cultural influences as is our modern world.

The living proof of that is the work of art that is being described as “the biggest discovery of the 21st century”: da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi where the right hand gesture of Jesus Christ isn’t simply a benediction or a blessing, but appears to be the Buddhist ardhapataka mudra – a sign of protection and a gesture to dispel undesirable elements from one’s life.

The symbolic meaning of Salvator Mundi also becomes clear: Jesus Christ through his gesture of his right hand is indicating that Earth, the world or the universe – represented by the crystal globe in his left hand – is being sought to be saved from calamity, evil and darkness.

Devdan Chaudhuri is the author of Anatomy of Life. He is one of the contributing editors of The Punch Magazine. He lives in Kolkata.

The Story of the Indian Bardo behind George Saunders’ Booker Winning ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’

Saunders’ experimental novel winning the prize opens up many new possibilities. Now, Indian Anglophone authors might finally think of adapting concepts from the vast philosophical traditions of the East.

Saunders’ experimental novel winning the prize opens up many new possibilities. Now, Indian Anglophone authors might finally think of adapting concepts from the vast philosophical traditions of the East.

An ethnic Tibetan woman walks behind prayer wheels at the Larung Wuming Buddhist Institute. Credit: Reuters

‘Buddhist-inspired ghost story set during the American Civil War’. This is how Anthony Cummins described George Saunders’ Man Booker Prize Winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo – ‘the hotly anticipated and then rapturously received first novel from an American heavyweight who made his name over two decades with his comic, dystopian short stories.’

Saunders – who said the novel had been in his heart for 20 years and that he had previously tried writing it ‘a couple of times and it didn’t work’ – was the bookies favourite. The judges praised the ‘utterly original’ work and said it was ‘deeply moving’.

BBC’s arts correspondent Rebecca Jones commented:

‘This is initially a rather off-putting book – it’s got a rather strange title and when you read the first few pages, you don’t really know what’s going on.’

The ‘strange title’ is because of the word ‘bardo’. What is bardo, where did it come from and how did it enter our consciousness?

The Bardo Thodol

The Bardo Thodol is a classic work of Tibetan Buddhism. In Tibet it is known as ‘The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding in the Between’. The ‘in the between’, the intermediate state – after what we commonly understand as ‘death’ – is called the bardo.

In Sanskrit bardo is antarabhava – transitional state, in-between state and luminal state of the consciousness of the karmic souls after leaving a human body and before taking another form or getting liberated.

The Bardo Thodol is from a larger corpus of teachings which fall under Nyingma literature – the Profound Dharma of Self-Liberation through the Intention of the Peaceful and Wrathful Ones – revealed by Karma Lingpa. I say revealed, because the Tibetans believe that the text was originally composed by Padma Sambhava and was revealed by Karma Lingpa (1326 –1386).

Padma Sambhava – whose status in Tibetan Buddhism is only next to Sakyamuni Buddha – is known to have left many ‘hidden treasures’/wisdom texts which are meant to be discovered and revealed by chosen people – the ‘tertons’ – when the time is right. The ‘hidden-treasures’ tradition is known as ‘Terma’ – a key concept in Vajrayana and Tibetan Buddhism. There is a corpus of Tibetan texts which come under Terma teachings and they have been translated in multiple languages.

Going by the Tibetan tradition, one has to credit Padma Sambhava (‘Lotus-Born’) – also known as Guru Rinpoche – for introducing the word bardo into the vocabulary of humanity via Karma Lingpa.

Bardo Thodol or The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Credit: Google ebook

Padma Sambhava – the founder of Vajrayana: an enigmatic school of the esoteric Tantric Buddhism – was the 8th century saint who came to be venerated as the ‘second Buddha’ – especially across Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and the Himalayan states of India.

So, bardo is a word coined by a Buddhist, that has entered the world via Tibet.

There are two kinds of history – real history and mythological history. The combination of both have led the scholars to locate the birth place of Padma Sambhava – the kingdom of Oddiyana – to swat valley (now in Pakistan) or the present Indian state of Odisha.

It is more probable that Padma Sambhava came from Eastern India, because Vajrayana Buddhism grew in Vanga – present day Bengal. The famous Buddhist masters Asita Dipankara, Tilopa and Naropa – associated with Nalanda University – came from Vanga: the ancient name of Bengal.

For over 700 years, till the early 20th century, the Bardo Thodol remained in Tibet.

Walter Evans-Wentz (1878-1965) was an American anthropologist and writer who pioneered the study of Tibetan Buddhism.

Evans-Wentz accidentally encountered Bardo Thodol in Tibet and was the first person to translate the text into English. He published the translation in 1927 – Bardo Thodol came to be known as The Tibetan Book of The Dead.

The cult status of The Tibetan Book of The Dead grew in the 1960s when Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert co-authored a book called The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of The Dead.

The Tibetan Book of The Dead has never been out of print ever since.

Now in 2017, the Man Booker Prize to Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo has brought the word bardo into greater focus.

I am yet to read Saunders’ novel that adapts the bardo to form his historical narrative based upon an intimate issue: the death of Abraham Lincoln’s child.

The prize to an experimental novel that taps into a ‘foreign’ cultural idea – of the bardo – opens up many new possibilities. Indian Anglophone authors might finally think of adapting ideas and concepts from the vast philosophical and spiritual traditions of the East, to frame their works in the future, and won’t wait for the Western Anglophone authors to show the way.

Till now, the overwhelming majority of the Anglophone Indian literary authors have avoided taking inspiration from the corpus of philosophical and spiritual literature of India. Primarily, the focus has been in the socio-political sphere, memoirs, immigration and history.

George Saunders, author of ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’, poses for photographers after winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2017 in London, Britain, October 17, 2017. Credit: Reuters

Jorge Luis Borges delved into Indian philosophical texts – especially Buddhism – and wove various ideas into his works. Carlos Fuentes based his magnum opus Terra Nostra on reincarnation. Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha told the story of the spiritual journey of a person during the time of Sakyamuni Buddha. Franz Kafka was influenced by Eastern spirituality – especially Taoism. T.S. Eliot employed allusions from Buddhism and Upanishads in The Wasteland. There are many such examples from Henry David Thoreau to W.H. Auden. But I cannot name a single well known Indian Anglophone author who has adapted ideas and concepts from Indian philosophy.

To paraphrase Amartya Sen, who once said that the tendency of the Anglophone Indians to ignore the philosophical works of India, is a ‘mistake’.

There is a political dimension to this as well. In the general absence of the liberal and the progressive intellectuals and authors delving into our tradition – in religion, science, philosophy and mysticism – the right wing is trying to fill the vacuum and making a hash of it.

To give an example, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remark about Ganesha and plastic surgery is well known. I don’t know of anyone from the liberal and progressive circles who hasn’t made jokes out of that remark. But there was no one to point out that Sushruta Samhita is an ancient Sanskrit text on medicine and surgery that is a pioneering work of human civilisation. It includes chapters describing surgical training, instruments and procedures.

Sushruta is already acknowledged as the ‘father of plastic surgery’ and the contribution of India to that field can be rightfully highlighted.

Ideally, ignorance – stemming from fantastical exaggeration and also neglect – needs to be avoided.

We also cannot allow the right wing – that portrays itself as the defender of all things Hindu/Indian – to muddle truths with exaggerations, falsities and distortions to serve their political agenda.

There is an urgent need for the liberal and the progressives of the Indian Anglosphere to engage with our ‘knowledge heritage’ in the time of right wing theocratic nationalism.

I have two copies of the Bardo Thodol or The Tibetan Book of the Dead – the one translated by Evans-Wentz and a latter translation by Robert Thurman, that includes a foreword by Dalai Lama.

For those who are intrigued and interested, I can recommend the two translations, for a deeper understanding of the bardo.

Devdan Chaudhuri is the author of Anatomy of Life. He is one of the contributing editors of The Punch Magazine. He lives in Kolkata.

In Bengal, Hindutva Confronts Two Icons – Tagore and Fish

Trying to separate the Bengali from fish will boomerang badly on the Hindutva advocates.

Trying to separate the Bengali from fish will boomerang badly on Hindutva advocates.

It doesn’t pay to be anti-fish in Bengal. Credit: Wikimedia Commons (left), WorldFish/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In Satyajit Ray’s Joi Baba Felunath – set in Benaras – Machli Baba is a fake sadhu aligned with the criminal smuggler of antiquities Maganlal Meghraj. In that film, Feluda makes a caustic remark that excessive overt religious devotion is a trait of the corrupt. And Machli Baba, after his pravachan on the ghat of Benaras, gives out a fish scale to all the devotees.

That machli or fish is integral to the Bengalis is common knowledge. My late maternal grandfather whose Mukherjee family is distantly related to S.P. Mukherjee – the founder of Jan Sangh – though he was a Kanyakubja Brahmin whose ancestral origins went to Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh, used to devour fish and meat every day. He didn’t relate religion to food. He held his holy thread before every meal, uttered something and then proceeded to eat his non-vegetarian breakfast, lunch and dinner with vigour. He was a foodie from the quarks of his bones.

Grandfather looked upon total vegetarianism as irrational; a self-inflicted injury to deny crucial nourishment that could make a person very ill and arrest higher mental development. He used to insist to me, from my boyhood days, to drink up the gravy of the Hilsa dish as well, because it would be good for my brain. Seafood and fish oil rich in omega-3 have played a role from the pre-historic times in the development of the human brain – this is a scientific fact. So since fish is a permanent part of the Bengali menu, certain diseases – related to memory and the brain – are much less in Bengalis.

But now fish, our much loved fish, is under attack in Bengal. BJP’s Hindutva food politics have reached Bengal via social media propaganda.

For the last six months, Bengali speaking trolls have surfaced in large numbers on Facebook and Twitter. They are swarming everywhere like locusts. One doesn’t need the detective skills or the mogoj ashtro (mental weapon) of Ray’s Feluda to figure out which ideology they are supporting.

This is Bengal’s disgrace, Michael Madhusudan Datta. He gave up his Hindu religion and converted to Christianity in order to marry foreign women. He wrote Meghnad Badh Kavya to support the Christian missionaries. In his poem, Lord Ram has been insulted by being called ‘Chandal’ (untouchable low-caste), despicable, etc. All the writings of M.M. Datta have to be banned. We will not tolerate Lord Ram being insulted.

Reports were already coming from rural Bengal that cow protection is turned into an issue and caste politics is being encouraged. A well-funded grassroots campaign is going on in rural Bengal to polarise the people in the name of religion and caste. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has spoken about this; she wants to stop or at least resist this campaign.

These trolls have spread all over social media with their propaganda. Memes demanding that the writings of poet Michael Madhusudan Dutta should be banned because he had converted to Christianity, married a foreigner and ‘insulted Rama’, were followed by memes which declared Tagore as ‘characterless,’ ‘anti-Hindu’ and a ‘pimp of the seculars and the British’.

(L) Bankim: The litterareur who truly deserved the Nobel prize. He was not afraid to speak the truth. (R) Tagore (seen with Helen Keller reading his lips): The characterless, licentious, anti Hindu agent of foreigners and secularists who got the Nobel.

(L) Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay: The litterateur who truly deserved the Nobel prize. He was not afraid to speak the truth.
(R) Rabindranath Tagore (seen with Helen Keller reading his lips): The characterless, licentious, anti Hindu agent of foreigners and secularists who got the Nobel.

On the other hand, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay – who in reality wrote ‘Bande Mataram’ while thinking of Bengal – is being eulogised as a ‘true Hindu’ who ‘should have received the Nobel Prize’, but was denied it because “he spoke the truth”. The fact that Bankim had died before the Nobel Prizes began is a small matter that is conveniently ignored. All this is being done to ‘awake Hindu Bengalis’, asking them to know their ‘true history’.

An organisation calling itself the ‘All India Fish Protection Committee’ has emerged on social media, threatening Bengalis who eat fish. Religion is invoked by mentioning Matsya, one of the ten avatars of Vishnu. To most Bengalis, all this is very comical. Some have responded that the silvery Hilsa in the memes is perfect to be converted into a nice, smoked fish.

All India Society for the saving of fish: The ‘matsa’ (fish) is God’s avatar. Consumption of fish equals the consumption of God. Our fish saving society is keeping a watch everywhere. Anyone caught eating fish will be beaten up mercilessly.

But beyond all this humour, something serious – and worrying – is brewing. For many Bengalis, this goes beyond resisting a political party; now it is a matter of preserving the liberal culture of Bengal from the assault of the conservative Hindustani cow belt culture. On Saturday, the state BJP president Dilip Ghosh – an MLA from Kharagpur – at a seminar at the Jadavpur University declared that he would lead a Ram Navami rally on April 5 with tridents and swords. Ram Navami celebration is a recent import into the state and the worship of Ram is not popular in Bengal, like it is in North India. Many are seeing this publicly announced rally – with swords and tridents – as a ploy to impose Hindustani cow belt culture on the liberal fabric of Bengal. Many Bengalis are offended and appalled at this attempt at socio-cultural engineering. A Hindu identity is being hammered into the minds to polarise people.

The BJP’s vote share in Bengal had fallen from its peak of 17% in the 2014 Lok Sabha election to 10% in the 2016 assembly elections. A renewed effort is now being made by BJP to increase the vote share. Banerjee has recently appealed to the Left Front to fight under the TMC leadership against the Hindutva ideology that is being spread systemically through these well-funded campaigns.

The Hindutva campaign is likely to boomerang. It doesn’t pay to be anti-fish in Bengal. The carrot and stick politics of BJP where the carrot is the mythical ‘development’ and the stick is ‘hate against anti-Hindus, ‘seculars’, Muslims, targeted intellectuals, anti-nationals and political opposition’ might stumble badly like Machli Baba of Ray’s Joi Baba Felunath, if the party is foolish enough to deny the Bengali her/his fish.

A vegetarian Hindu Rashtra with anti-Romeo vigilantism and a regressive ultra-conservative mindset is not the idea of Bengal or indeed of India. They are repulsed by this idea and want to resist it by safeguarding liberal culture.

Bengal is one of the large bastions which has resisted Hindutva ideology and stopped its surge in Bengal after 2014. If Bengal falls, India will fall, is the common feeling amongst the liberals and the progressives in Kolkata. The soul of Bengalis is related to ponds, rivers, ocean and fish. If something fishy happens there, there is no chance of BJP advancing beyond its support base for a long time to come.

Devdan Chaudhuri is the author of Anatomy of Life. He is one of the contributing editors of The Punch Magazine. He lives in Kolkata.

You Know Bob Dylan, But Do You Know Lalon Fokir?

Bob Dylan may have won the literature Nobel, but let’s not forget the great Bengali poet and performer who inspired countless others.

The only sketch of Lalon Fokir made during his lifetime, by Jyotirindranath Tagore in 1889. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The literary community is justifiably divided about Bob Dylan winning the 2016 Nobel Prize of Literature for ‘having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.’ We’ve all read many articles expressing diverse opinions on the matter on the screens of our smart-phones and other gadgets at this point. Such are our times – so radically different from the past – that our digital engagement has become an indispensable aspect of our modern lives. So it’s unsurprising that the sentiment of ‘times they are a changing’ has possessed our minds.

By awarding Dylan the prize, the Nobel Committee has not only raised the question of ‘what is literature’ but also expanded the meaning and relevance of the word. Many are sceptical about this expansion and have wondered whether screen-plays, stand-up comedy and even tweets can be considered literary. It has also left me wondering if the ‘performance’ aspect of an artist’s work has also become a factor for judging literary work in? Literary festivals are also performances – conversations held in public for the benefit of an audience. Shy authors who dislike public engagements are already on the decline. Most authors have to prepare how they will speak and how they will smile or frown in front of their mirrors before they head out to ‘perform’ at a literary panel. What will be said – the actual words – need to correspond with body language, gestures, dress code, tone, manner of speech and so on. The auditory and the visual aspects are as important as the words – image making is important, sometimes more so than the art.

Those who love solitude – the essential infrastructure for art – need to become performance artists for the public. Only those who have experienced being in that position can tell you about the terrors and the nervousness they experience and the strange sensations in the pits of their stomachs.

So in our world, stage performances and managing public perceptions has become so crucial that everyone from authors to terrorist organisations hire PR firms now.

PR can get you further than mere art can. Virtual reality – the internet – is as important as the physical reality of our world.

Placing a premium on perfomance

At an event which featured Amitav Ghosh, I noticed that people were queuing up – not to get the book signed – but to take a selfie with the author. The photo with Ghosh – immediately posted on social media even as the selfie taker stumbled down the steps of the dais – matters more than Ghosh’s forceful and urgent prose about climate change.

So everyone wants to create an image of themselves. In such a climate, perception and performances along with entertainment value are dominating over actual ideas, actions and their consequences. Politicians know this better than anyone else, since they go to great lengths to create and maintain specific public perceptions. Asking uncomfortable questions is discouraged and punished, covertly as well as openly. Recently it has become increasingly difficult to express oneself, even in democratic societies which supposedly value freedom of expression. Those who don’t perform to the tune of the official narrative are called ‘anti-nationals’, ‘intellectual terrorists’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’.

So whether one likes it or not, taking an artist’s performative ability into account while choosing the literature Nobel’s winner is simply a sign of our times.

But I welcome the decision since it has prompted us to think about literature and the world we inhabit. Poetic expressions in folk songs constitute the origins of literature as we now understand it – it is a radical idea to merge ancient oral tradition, 1960s and 70s history and our societal focus on the performative with the idea of literature.

Saying the above, I would also hope that this decision is not just an exception in the Nobel tradition but a step towards a new normal. Gamblers at Ladbrokes might take bets against Leonard Cohen and Gulzar from next year onwards. But I hope that we return to the authors, poets, playwrights and even philosophers, for a time period, before it becomes necessary to pose new questions to society.

Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album cover. Credit: Jazz Guy/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Lalon Fakir

Robert Zimmerman, better known to us as Bob Dylan – who has taken his surname from the poet Dylan Thomas – had a long association with the mystical folk tradition of the Bauls of Bengal. Purna Das Baul and Luxman Das Baul feature on the cover of Dylan’s album ‘John Wesley Harding.’ Dylan also turned up in Calcutta to attend the wedding of Purna’s son.

The tradition of poetic expressions through folk songs is the tradition of the Bauls of Bengal. The stalwart in this tradition is undoubtedly Lalon Fakir, who was also a part of the nineteenth century Bengal Renaissance, when modernity and new ideas were entering Bengali society. Lalon was born in Kushtia village (now in Bangladesh); he had no formal education and lived a long life of poverty. Lalon composed songs of mystical, social and political content which he sung to the poor peasants of the land. As his reputation grew, Lalon inspired many poets, including Rabindranath Tagore and Allen Ginsberg. He was a mystic, song writer, singer, social reformer and thinker. But his source of inspiration was the life he lived not philosophy or literary books.

It is estimated that Lalon composed many songs – somewhere between 2000 to 8000 – but left no written record of the compositions. They were mainly orally transmitted to his rural followers, who were illiterate and could not transcribe the works. Tagore published some of Lalon’s poetic expressions/folk songs in Calcutta’s monthly Prabasi magazine.

But in the today’s world, the internet is helping inspire public interest in Lalon. There are sites dedicated to his work where one can read Lalon’s astonishingly complex mystical poetry/lyrics in Bengali and even hear his songs, sung by others on YouTube.

There has also been a surge in academic interest in Lalon. Scholars from foreign universities are writing various papers about his surviving works which have been translated into English.

To give you a taste of his work, let me quote two translated songs of his. The two poems/ lyrics – translated by Azfar Hussain – are taken from Reading About the World.

A Strange Bird

Look, how a strange bird flits in and out of the cage!
O brother, I wish I could bind it with my mind’s fetters.
Have you seen a house of eight rooms with nine doors
Closed and open, with windows in between, mirrored?
O mind, you are a bird encaged! And of green sticks
Is your cage made, but it will be broken one day.
Lalon says: Open the cage, look how the bird wings away!

Casteism

People ask, what is Lalon’s caste?
Lalon says, my eyes fail to detect
The signs of caste. Don’t you see that
Some wear garlands, some rosaries
Around the neck? But does it make any
Difference brother? O, tell me,
What mark does one carry when
One is born, or when one dies?
A Muslim is marked by the sign
Of circumcision; but how should
You mark a woman? If a Brahmin male
Is known by the thread he wears,
How is a woman known? People of the world,
O brother, talk of marks and signs,
But Lalon says: I have only dissolved
The raft of signs, the marks of caste
In the deluge of the One!

Devdan Chaudhuri is the author of Anatomy of Life.

Thanks to the Nobel Prizes We Get to Read Writers from Outside the Anglophone West

Indian publishers too have begun to follow trends of literary fiction, rather than literature, that is so prevalent in English speaking countries

Svetlana Alexievich from Belarus who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 Credit: Reuters

It’s that time of the year again – we will know who wins the Nobel Prize of Literature on 13 October. Hopefully we will discover someone like Patrick Modiano and Svetlana Alexievich, who were virtual unknowns in the Anglophone West-centric literary world of ours. The works of Modiano and Alexievich only started to arrive in India after their Nobel wins; we would have been denied of their profound works which experimented with form and the way of saying, if the Nobel Prize wasn’t conferred upon them. Their works weren’t also published by the mainstream UK and USA publishers, and this says a lot about the motivation and the ability of the Anglophone world to recognize and publish world literature. One feels a certain gratitude for the Nobel Prize for being the only prize in our world that continues to identify and celebrate literature.

India hasn’t won the Nobel Prize for Literature since Tagore–it has been over 100 years since that momentous event for Asia. The reasons for that could be many: regional language literature wasn’t translated or didn’t find its way to Europe. In Calcutta, there are still passionate discussions about why certain Indian authors – who didn’t write in English – should have won the Nobel Prize, but they didn’t, because they were not promoted by the Indian literary ecosystem. The names of Jibananda Das, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay U.R. Ananthamurthy and Ashapurna Devi are always mentioned.

This ecosystem has now progressively become very dependent upon the Anglosphere (London and New York) to determine for them, what should be promoted and valued. The Indian mainstream press and media, whose global political narratives are also largely dependent upon the mainstream Western media supports this worldview. We are largely still piggybacking on the Anglophone west, which Gayatri Spivak calls ‘Intellectual Colonisation’. Even the Indian Lit Prizes – which have become very predictable – are largely dependent upon the perception of the gatekeepers of the publishing world of the West, and more often than not take their cue from western recognition. Instead of works from the East going to the West, the major flow is from the West to the East, on which the boat of Indian Anglophone Literary World is sailing.

This sailing with the current, and not against it, can and does have a detrimental effect upon Indian writing in English, in terms of what is essential aimed for through the writings – authors might follow the cue of a narrow band of novels, in order to get published in the Anglophone world and to seek Western validation. This might curb originality, experimentation and the free flow of creative imagination. We find that certain types of literary novels by Indian authors are more accepted for publication than the Indian novels which have moved away from the themes of immigration, post-colonialism, elucidation of Indian history and culture etc. to newer themes such as memory, 21^st century modernity and philosophical inquiries.

This gives the impression that the publishing world of the Anglophone West is not really looking for new promising Indian literature, but looking for certain types of novels – which are often stereotypical in their outlook and execution – which fit their pre-existing notions of India closely aligned with the market that consumes novels which are published under the multicultural agenda.

This neoliberal ideology-inspired policy of trying to make literature economically profitable has resulted in the explosion of literary fiction of various levels whose values and principles have made literary fiction accessible to a larger readership. The trend started in mid-eighties and rose through the nineties, and is continuing in the second decade of the 21^st century. But this risk-averse commercially successful policy has also had a detrimental effect in terms of literature, and has diluted some of its core values.

Gabriel Josipovici, the former Weidenfeld professor of comparative literature at Oxford University, condemned the work of the giants of the modern English novel (Rushdie, Barnes and McEwan) as hollow. In a 2010 article titled ‘Feted British authors are limited, arrogant and self-satisfied, says leading academic’, Josipovici told the Guardian: ‘It’s an ill-educated public being fed by media – ‘This is what great art is’ – and they lap it up.’

According to Josipovici, ‘we are in a very fallow period that is profoundly disappointing – a poor relation of its ground-breaking modernist forebears.’

In the US too, criticism against the modern novels of literature in English was beginning to be heard. In a 2011 article titled ‘Why American novelists don’t deserve the Nobel Prize’ published in Salon, Alexander Nazaryan blamed creative writing courses for the pervasive insularity of contemporary American literature and called the Pulitzer winning novels as ‘small bore stuff, lack of imagination disguised as artistic humility.’

Nazaryan called the rising generation of writers behind Oates, Roth and DeLillo, ‘Great White Narcissists – even the writers who aren’t male (or white).’

Nazaryan wrote, ‘Jhumpa Lahiri is a Great White Narcissist whose characters tend to be upper-middle-class Indian-Americans living in the comfortable precincts of Boston or New York. Swap the identity to Chinese-American, move the story a couple of generations back on the immigrant’s well-trod saga, and you have Amy Tan.’

The focal point of all the criticisms against the modern English novel lead to what Kundera anticipated in the eighties – repetition of form, lack of discoveries and the absence of the hitherto unsaid, which can lead to the end of the history of the novel: authors ceasing to seek out the never said, not inventing new forms, avoiding deep complexities and succumbing to serve the taste of the masses.

Going by the points raised by the critics of the modern English novel, we can understand that Literature and its values have diminished in the Anglophone West in the 21^st century, because of the excessive importance given to the perceived notion of the market and to expand readership. If one has to find literature, one has to look beyond that Anglophone sphere.

We thus need more translations of world literature, and less of the predictable English language literary fiction that is coming to us from the West.

Literary Fiction is not Literature; we need to distinguish between the two. The ‘frequency of consciousness’ – a term I borrow from Indian philosopher Abhinava Gupta of Kashmir Shaivaism – of literary fiction and of literature are very different. There are other crucial differences between depth, language, voice, tone, universality, layers, meaning, impulse, vision, form and so on.

The ‘frequency of consciousness’ of literary fiction is largely dominating the conversation within the Indian Anglophone Literary World; this has also narrowed down the judgement of what is important. Amit Chaudhuri told me in a long interview that I did of him – published in The Byword: ‘…there is not enough variety in the ecosystem….there isn’t enough oppositionality.’

At present, we do have a large problem in our way of seeing and judging. Our over-dependence upon the perceptions and narratives of the market-oriented Anglophone West (London and New York) is also taking us away from innovations, independent thinking and the courage to go against the flow. What we teach in the outdated courses in our Universities – which are suffering from a colonial hangover – is also failing to expand the idea of literature in the 21^st century world. We seem to be more contend to remain in the relatively shallower world of literary fiction, than to delve into the deep world of literature.

Is the PR driven game-show format of The Booker and The Pulitzer is having a detrimental effect on Indian writing in English?

Are Indian writers aspiring for the styles/values/themes which dominate the commercial literary fiction world of Anglophone West and not aspiring to go beyond them?

Do juries, critics and readers in India have the ability to distinguish literature from literary fiction?

These are the questions, which we need to ponder about, if we aspire to create and to read literature in the 21^st century India. We need to understand that only literature can speak to us in a special ‘frequency of consciousness’ which can combine various impulses, tell stories, offer aesthetics, interpret existence, expand knowledge, take leaps in imagination, create new forms, make us see the invisible, address fundamental questions, make us think deeply about ourselves and our world, and shape our consciousness, in a profound manner.

In India, due to our historic English language associated links with UK, the gatekeepers, the critics, the academics, the prize juries, the publishing houses and the media and thus the conversations and discussions about literature/literary fiction are dominated by various coteries who speak more about the books and the authors who write in English. But we need to go beyond that, and also listen to the greater world.

Dag Solstad, Adam Zagajewski, Adonis, Cesar Aira, Amos Oz, Javier Marias, Peter Handke, Jon Fosse, Ko Un, Antonis Lobo Antunes and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o are some of the examples of authors, poets and playwrights whom we need to read; and this illustrious bunch might also dominate the winners list of the Nobel Prize for Literature within the next decade.

As far as 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature is concerned, I would be happy to discover yet another unknown (who hasn’t been mentioned above), who will help us to recover, to understand, to relish and to celebrate the sublime values, and the profound spirit, of literature.

Devdan Chaudhuri is the author of the novel ‘Anatomy of Life’. He is based in Kolkata