Tag: The Arsonist

Kabira khada bazar mein, liye luathi haath,
Jo ghar foonke aapna, chale hamare saath.

(Kabir, stands in the market place, carrying a burning torch,
Set fire to your own house, if you wish to accompany him.)

Thus spoke Kabir, the 15th-century mystic poet and inventor of Sandhya Bhasha or language of riddles. His philosophy as also his language is neither Hindu nor Islamic, but a hybrid born of various dialects two contemporary heretical sects used: Nath and Siddha.

This weaver, illiterate poet, unwanted son of a widowed Brahmini, brought up by a Muslim couple, rose to be an iconoclast who sought no disciples but acquired many. He finally told his disciples, who were hell-bent on compiling his bani (poems) in (the only authentic collection of his poems) Bijak, “Do not trust what is written therein (Santo, Bijak matt parmanaa).”

He was definitely a rare bird, but the way the taxonomy of 21st-century Indo-Anglian writing presents Kabir as exotic is somewhat cringeworthy. I am afraid Kiran Nagarkar’s latest novel The Arsonist, which tries to decontextualise Kabir from his time and present him as a guru for modern India, also reduces him to a combo of Rajnish and Sadhguru.

There is a sense in which Kabir is very modern. He was largely free from the vices of florid speech and performing miracles. He did not lean towards either his Hindu guru (Ramanand)’s faith, nor towards the Islamic teachings of the clerics. He never knelt for gurus or the patshah (Sikandar Lodhi in this case).

Still, like most writers of Bhakha (a pre-Hindi vernacular prototype of Hindvi) poetry in the middle period, he was tricky. He made a faith of personal sincerity and a career of disingenuousness. The way Nagarkar’s Kabir meanders through long (often tortuous) arguments with his disciples like Athang, Alan or His Majesty (redolent of Vajpayee and his weak-kneed admonitions regarding Raj Dharma), just does not gel.

Then there are the women.

Kabir had married Loyi, another abandoned child like him. Some of his most gentle poems are addressed to her:
“Kahat Kabir sunahu O Loyi, hum tum binasi, rahego soyi (Says Kabir oh listen Loyi, you and I will turn into dust, only He shall remain).” Nagarkar’s Kabir, in the age of #MeToo, is married to the mistreated Kashmira, who kicks him out. He threatens her, “I would return, vengeance would be mine…I would make her suffer and plead for mercy.” Sentences like, “This country suffers from a surfeit of monster egos. Let’s celebrate your birthday every year as the National Festival of Monster ego-busting comedy” will make even Nagarkar’s erstwhile admirers like me cringe. 

Kabir’s mind moved fast; still, when it came to women, it moved no faster than the times allowed. One of the dohas ascribed to him says jokingly, if a woman’s shadow falling on a snake can blind him, think my brothers, of those that stay with women all the time. And yet it was not women that pulled him down, it was his son Kamal: “Booda vansha Kabir ka, upja poot Kamal, Hari ka sumiran chhand ke ghar le aayaa maal (My son Kamal has dragged my family down by eschewing a holy life for riches of various kinds).”

Also read: Kabir in His Time, And Ours

“Nostalgia,” writes Nagarkar, “is not just selective memory, it is the reinvention of the past as it never was.” Okay. But if nostalgia morphs into misanthropy, as it occasionally does here, it bothers. “Let me state right at the start,” Nagarkar writes, (ironically in the Afterword), “I am neither a Kabir student nor a scholar. Yes we did have Charlotte Vaudeville’s book of translations of Kabir’s Dohas and Bijak at home and I dipped into them from time to time but I have to confess shamefully that I am not that passionately into poetry…when I was sitting in my friend Renate’s house writing my novel God’s little soldier… By the time the GLS was done it had 16 pages of excerpts from Amanat (one of the two protagonists)’s book The Arsonist.”

In the currently common laissez-faire coziness of liberal humanism, lives Nagarkar’s Kabir, now discussing the His Majesty’s dress, now travelling with His Majesty. Given the man and his extreme aversion to kings and the Brahminical nobility of Kashi of the 15th century, this seems outlandish and bizarre. The Arsonist is too busy portraying the many-faceted genius as a Bhakti poet who has such a deep sense of irony and humour, and never quite captures the description the author himself has come out with in the Afterword. 

Is it because his ideal reader is a kind of projection, not entirely sympathetic to him personally perhaps, but definitely of a type? This is a type we come across more and more – the frequent Indian flier to Europe, who returns for a few months in the year to write on Kashi-Delhi-Kolkata-Mumbai-Bangaluru… 

Neither Kabir nor Nagarkar mind you, are mere pebble slingers. But for each of them not only the means but also the aims of literature are different. “Let me ask an embarrassing question,” Nagarkar says to his reader. “We may sing Kabir, but when will we start living like Kabir, that is living by his tenets?” The tone and tenor of the question are proof that Nagarkar’s destination is the bold Anglo-Indian or European reader, who will come and squat inside his novel and enjoy polemics that last occasionally for several pages in exotic locations and comic situations. 

Kabir is hot and brief in the original: precise, swift and anything but self-indulgent. The tension between the two writers gets even more acute when one tries to read Kabir (in Roman) as Nagarkar chooses his verses at random. It is a tension between authorial privilege and a radical invocation of the individual’s rights that Kabir stood for. This despite the fact that both writers are equally concerned about the human situation and literary bliss.

Why analyse the pleasures that both sides know or should know first hand? Why resort instead to wild analogy, aggressive promotion of 21st-century liberalism shaped in the cauldron of India’s upper middle classes, across complex cultural codes that treat the readers as passive and the author as the guru? Is all this game playing, this sleight of hand, the juxtapositions in time and cultural complexity leaping again and again over 600 years of India’s evolution, truly for the reader at all?  

Also read: When Kumar Gandharva Fearlessly Sings Kabir’s Formless Form

Lines from Nabokov on reality sum up this novel wonderfully well:

“Reality is a very subjective affair…A lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person…but more real to the botanist. And yet more…to a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer…to reality; but you can never get near enough…it’s hopeless.” 

Mrinal Pande is a writer and journalist, and the former editor of Hindustan.