Jan Myrdal on Mahakavi Sri Sri

Jan Myrdal is the son of Gunnar and Ava Myrdal both of whom won Nobel Prizes (Gunnar for Econ, Ava for Peace). Jan reckons they were crappy parents. His Mom was a big supporter of forced Sterilization (those fun loving Swedes kept up the practice till '75) but, unfortunately, failed to tie her own tubes before squeezing out little Jan.
He himself embraced far left politics and was an uncritical admirer of Mao's China and Pol Pot's Kampuchea both of which he actually visited. Needless to say he hates democratic India coz it's like real oppressive? and y'know kind'o genociding the poor people? and being nasty to those nice little Naxals in Lalgarh who just want to establish a truly equal society by beheading everybody.

Anyway, young Jan has uttered an encomium on the Telugu poet and Cine artist (himself an admirer of Sarojini Naidu's younger brother whose most memorable film role was as the 'gadi babu' (the guy  who went around winding up the clocks in the big haveli) in Sahib Bibi and Ghulam.
Click here to read it.
You'd never guess, from Myrdal's account, that this great supposed Naxalite poet endorsed the Emergency. Or that he was all for N.T Rama Rao in the 1982 elections.
Fuck is wrong with Jan Myrdal?

'Pursue Knowledge even unto China!'

(This is extracted from my novel 'Samlee's daughter' )

Once upon a time, there was a great Mujtahid ul Asar^[1] in the City of Azimabad. He was the most venerated Shia Divine in living memory. Then tragedy befell him. His wife died in child-birth. The Mujtahid controlled his grief and consoled himself with caring for the new-born. The infant showed every sign of intellectual and spiritual precocity. Dispensing with nursemaids and housekeepers, the Mujtahid brought up the boy- a Salaman without an Absal^[2]- in the company of venerable scholars and veritable saints. Soon, the lad excelled his teachers. The devout assembled from the four corners of Hindustan to witness this Hujjat ul Islam- this living proof of the True Religion.

Thus, when his own health failed, the fond father died secure in the knowledge that his son would be a worthy successor to his own great office.

The boy was called before the King, to preach his first sermon. Mounting the minbar, he began with the profession of the True Faith. But, he got no further than saying ‘there is no God’. No matter how hard he tried he could not complete the sentence ‘there is no God but God’.

He was hounded from the court as an apostate and a painted sepulchre. The boy was stunned. He stumbled down the highway scarcely sensible to the taunts and jeers that dogged his footsteps. One day, he met a crazy dervish. The dervish rolled his eyeballs into their sockets and went into a trance. “Pursue Knowledge even unto China!” The dervish pointed north. So, it was his Knowledge that had been imperfect. The boy turned his steps towards steep paths and snowy wastes. After years of travelling, he gained his objective. Learning the strange languages of the heathen, he travelled up and down the thronging roads and teeming rivers of that vast land. He met scholars and scoundrels, monks and mandarins. But, that Nation possessed of a thousand books, yet was not a People of the Book. He had wasted his time.

One night, his boat moored at a lonely quay. Suddenly, out of the shadows, a figure emerged. It was a peasant in late middle age- still hale and hearty- carrying his aged mother on his back. The boy invited the peasant to come and rest on the boat. The peasant’s broad, weather beaten, countenance beamed with pleasure. He told his story in few words. First came the famine, then the bandits, and then the tax collectors. He had not waited for the tax collectors, but loaded his mother on his back and left the ancestral graves to look after themselves.

That night the boy had a dream. He was reading a book by lamplight. Suddenly, he looked up and saw the light was not coming from the lamp. It was coming from the body of a man. The boy woke up abruptly. He had nodded off while reading. But, when he looked, the lamp had not been lit. The illumination was coming from the body of the peasant. The boy shook him awake. The boy said- ‘having a luminous body is a mark of the Prophet. What Book has been revealed to you?’

The peasant said- ‘I’ve been lucky. Mother’s face is my book. Each day, some new wonder.’

‘Truly,’ the new-made Mujtahid said, ‘there is no God but God.’

---

^[1]    Mujtahid ul Asar- Chief Shia Cleric. A Mujtahid is one licensed to use his own judgement (ijtehad) to pronounce on matters of Faith.

^[2]    In Jami’s ‘Salaman & Absal’, which fascinated the Victorians, Salaman was born, without a mother, to the King of Greece. Absal was the Nanny who brought him up, before- & more successfully than the Nanny in ‘the Pirates of Penzance’- amorously entangling her charge & eloping with him to the Earthly Paradise. The Court Magician, by his mesmeric power, gets Salaman to build a pyre of brushwood on which the two lovers immolate themselves. However, only Absal (who symbolises Earthly passions) perishes in the flame while Salaman emerges purified.   Finally, Zohra (Heavenly Beauty) expels even the memory of Absal from Salaman’s mind.

Terrorism and the Media.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, with respect to Terrorism, the Media’s great crime is to grant the oxygen of publicity to the perpetrator's narrow cabal while denying the victims a voice. 

True, there are some T.V channels which seek to remedy this by asking people how they feel about being blown up while the process is actually occurring, but little of such footage- for obvious reasons- is aired and what little is aired tends to be marred by the lack of objectivity of the victims. 

They tend to say things like “Ow! It hurts! Make it stop!” rather than point out, in a proper manner, the Media’s tendency to deny victims a voice- thus victimizing them yet further.  Indeed, the paradox is, it is not until victims resort to terrorism that their voice is truly heard. More generally, we may say, all violence is the voice of the victim and all victimization arises from being denied precisely such a voice. Thus viewers of the Media’s coverage of this issue- rather than incontinently crying out, “Ow! It hurts! Make it stop!”- must recover their voice as victims by resorting to terrorism.  This can be done without getting out of their armchairs not by the Baudrillardian technique of resistance- viz. channel surfing- which could impact on Nielsen ratings and drive Terrorism off the air- but by farting occasionally. 

Of course, if this is not sufficient to secure Media attention for our plight, then stronger steps will have to be taken. Indeed, it seems, some already have. Thus we see all violence is but the denied voice of the viewer and the fact that even the Media flags in fascination with this voice enables it to arrive at victimhood because its voice, in this matter, is being denied. 

Heaven's hermeneutics

Blue

Nothing new.

Who?

You too

& this the hermeneutics
of heaven

Mirror maieutics
 six directions

Seven.

Arundhati Roy- dotty but by no means dim.

It's twelve years since I read 'The God of small things'- Ms. Roy’s ultra-feminist version of, the ‘Return of Orestes’ in which suffering either homicide or hebephrenia was the only permitted alternative to screaming sociopathy for any Indian cursed with the possession of a penis. 

I was immediately enchanted. Roy was clearly dotty but by no means dim.. It seemed brave- at least, within the heavily exoticised incest- in-the-chutney-factory Indglish-for-export genre of that period- to take on the Electra theme and all that it represents for M.F.A  mad cows everywhere- and really beat the fucking thing to death. 

But I'd underestimated Ms.Roy.  Preserving her orthogonal posture towards Reality, she went on to write, often on worthwhile topics, a string of politically engaged books and articles which demonstrated the radically Manichaean nature of the Universe and the impotence of the liberal conscience to strive against its Psychotic demiurge save at the cost of its own sanity.
Which would have been fine and dandy- literature jus' doin' its job- if it hadn't been for the rise and rise of Narendra Modi.

I mean, who would have thought this Backward Caste yokel  could actually take on the farmer's lobby and correct for Market breakdown (in things like micro-irrigation) and make balanced growth fiscally and environmentally viable? 

 Modi's success raised uncomfortable questions. What if these backwards and tribals and vernacular medium types weren't just smarter than us but also like just better human fucking beings? 

Liberalism is another word for the moral hegemony of shitheads like me. Socialism is Liberalism's married name when it really gets to grips with fucking up society. Communism is one better than Socialism coz that way we get to fuck up society while hanging onto 'Forward Caste' status.
Naxalism is one better than Communism coz that way we get to carry guns and fantasize about shooting police constables and, like, hang out with sweet teenage, tribal types who aren't actual 'Trust-afarians' whose Daddies and Mummies went to School with us and who, in too well modulated tones, moan about having become Merchant Bankers as if they'd ever actually had any choice; like it wasn't fucking inevitable.

But fuck me, fuck us- we don't matter any more.

Why?

Coz Modi shows how the Market really is better than our own particular Holier than God, God. I think it was Jefferson who said 'in matters of Religion- divided we stand, united we fall.' But, by his own account, that's Modi's Hindutva in a nutshell! No wonder those damn upwardly mobile  Muslim Ghanchis now embrace him- after all, caste-wise, he is one of their own. Of course, the post Godhra riots were inexcusable for not being repeated pre every succeeding poll. Had they been we'd have no difficulty making room for Modi in our Syndicate. Our Socialist-Scientific-Secular Caste fucking Syndicate which instrumentalizes rape, riot and randomized institutional violence to synchronize with its own occult astrology of Power...

Not by default- nor, damningly for an artist, by design- but with her sloe-like eyes (what havoc they must have caused at Lovedale!)  shrewdly open (this kid went on from her poshest of posh boarding schools to live in a squatter's colony while just sixteen!) ,Roy has done this much for us.

But for her, Modi wouldn't look so damn good.

dast-e tah-e sang-āmadah paimān-e vafā hai

Prof. Frances Pritchett, creator of the wonderful 'desertful of roses' site on Ghalib, waxes lyrical about this couplet-

majbūrī-o-daʿvā-e giriftārī-e ulfat

dast-e tah-e sang-āmadah paimān-e vafā hai
For my part I always really liked Dard's

 'patthar tale ki haath hai gaflat ke haath dil

Sang-e-giran hua hai yeh khwaab-e-giraan mujhe'

A heavy stone has heavy slumber been to me, and

In sloth's hands, my heart, a stone crushed hand

I wonder whether this response of ours has to do with the Anglo American  Peine forte et dure tradition- i.e the crushing of a defendant who refuses to plead. Of course, in India the more relevant reference is to the ghotna- the heavy roller used to crush the thighs of a suspect.

However, the connection between crushing and standing mute (refusing to plead) esp. for writers (for whom the hand rather than the tongue is the means of expression) is going to have resonances for us of which we might not be consciously aware.  

I was 11 or 12 when Indira Gandhi promulgated Emergency and some of my Dad's journalist friends- including a near neighbour who had a pretty daughter (I've written about this in my novel 'Samlee's daughter) were arrested.  

In the distinguished Professor's case, for all I know, there may be Arthur Miller's 'the Crucible' and the McCarthyite witch-hunts at the back of it.

 I see, from Wikipedia, that the only American to have been crushed to death was one Giles Corey who - in the film version of 'The Crucible'- refuses to name names.

However, the context independent point here is that refusal to plead 'aye or nay' was what got you crushed to death. Language is like that. But to plead is also to be crushed to death- or at least to be permitted only a sort of liquidised life within Language obedient to the tides of its lunatic Moon- so there was never any real choice. 

But that's the nature of Language. Okay. We can both live with that. The Americans have weaponized their music (they used rock & roll against Noreiga) and the Indians are now weaponizing their food. 

The Europeans have not the resources of such as we.

We're safe. Or are we?

The trouble is that when Language held a knife to Love's throat- saying 'Do you take this man/woman/panda- answer 'yea or nay'- then, ah! then ...

Okay! I think I get why the Prof. likes this couplet! 

More mystic marvels of poesy

As a flower to the bee

or Existence to His 'Be!"

The mirror opens its sex

Only to its ex

Thy frigidity so fires my phallus

Ashes art thy gash's palace

Gnosis, God! cry me a river

Fucked 'tis to fuck a mirror

---------------

Fearing a critic, curt, might curb my inspiration

(Force-fed shite, he’d counsel constipation)

What, grave, I write as grave dirt must lie

On my samadhi trite & barzakh I.