Indian Literature:Bengali writers are fighting a losing war
Uday Prakash
(I am no more an optimist. I refuse to look at the coming decade the way Rabindranath Tagore might have looked towards oncoming decades during his lifetime. Things were definitely different those days. There was the nationalist movement. The freedom struggle was going on and the whole colonial world on earth was looking towards India with a new hope.)
The new light was expected to come from Asia. And from no other place than from here, our own country. Every language writer at that time was a vanguard of sort, a torchbearer up to some extent. Tagore was one of them. Whether it was Gandhi s Tolstoy Ashram in South Africa or Tagore s Shanti Niketan in West Bengal, the whole of Europe was watching with anxiety and expectations. It was an act of pride for an author of WB Yeat s stature to write a preface to Geetanjali, the first-ever Asian work, written in Bengali, to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The whole world forgot the infamous Italian fascist Mussolini and was singing Tagore s poetry. Major poets from Europe and Latin America such as Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Zimnes, Ezra Pound and Andre Zide translated Tagore s poems into their respective languages.
Things are in different shape now. We are living in a post-colonial era. Things are now in our own hands. No one else but we have to carry our weight: After independence some 50-odd years ago, culture has rested solely in our own hands, waiting to be shaped through our own dreams and doings. Now who are we to complain about or to for the whole mess when vernacular languages, as they have been called, scream for identities?
We language writers are members of the same of old writers community of the world and we deserve a dignified space in it. If our country wants an equal status politically in international organisations, we as the member of its cultural community are also no less an egalitarian. We know nothing except writing, just like Balzac or Pushkin or Shakespeare knew nothing else. Tolstoy is known to us for War and Peace, a timeless piece of work. We, as writers, have spent our life force to create something meaningful and relevant to our time and reality. And the truth is that we did have our consumers. We had our market, with readers buying our books.
The Bengali magazine I had been editing was a widely-circulated, very popular socio-cultural weekly magazine of its own kind. It became a household magazine in Bengali middle class families. Its circulation was amazingly enviable. Now it is on the blink, it has become a fortnightly. We no longer have the same influx of ad revenue, which is the backbone for any commercial journal. Language publications can t think of selling in kabadi prices. You can t find a 24-page Bengali daily being sold anywhere with an invitation price of Re 1. Is it a fair market, if you look at it with vernacular eyes? It is like ancient Olympiads where athletes were given medals not for what they did in the stadium but for the race, politics and cultures they represented.
We also feel that we are playing our game before a biased umpire. It is not at all a fair game. Our matches are fixed. The bookies are out there. Don t you see the irony, that while we win a war at Kargil, we lose our battle here in culture? With each achievement in nuclear missile or information technology, we witness another language journal folding up.
This is perhaps the reason why after 50-odd years of independence we are in a place where we shy off from being language writers, if you can call us so.
When Salman Rushdie wrote his much talked about article on 50 years of Indian literature after Independence in New Yorker in June 1997, I was deeply anguished. I experienced the wound inside my heart, bleeding for decades. It hurts. We feel ourselves inferior. And this feeling has been provided by the forces who control and manage literature market.
I am tempted to say then that Salman Rushdie is illiterate as far as Indian languages are concerned. How can you comment on something which you don't know at all!Now I am surprised to find Khushwant Singh joining him. He says he chose to write in English because Indian languages have a limited vocabulary. As proof, he quotes his discovery that Hindi does not have a synonym for the word seagull . I don t want to make a comment on that. Silence is a better tribute to their ignorance. Tell me, then, how did this Hinglish, or Indian English, take birth in this soil and blossom in the Western market? Is this a new English, almost reviving a decaying culture out of the burden of its own colonial past, a slang containing Scottish, American or Irish words, adhering to their syntax?
Rushdie s own writing has many words unfamiliar to a European reader. I am afraid Khushwant Singh or Salman Rushdie are totally incapable of seeing the richness of Sanskrit. Most of the Indian languages have branched from it and receive their life energy from various regional languages and dialects. It is a truth that Tamil, which is even older than Sanskrit, has a dictionary weightier than the dictionary of any of the European languages.
I am pained when I sense the mindset of Indian English writers, particularly in relation to vernacular languages. For example, they comment that Bankim Chandra, the great author of Anand Math, failed to succeed in English after attempting a few novels in that language. His success in Bengali, they feel, owes itself to language literature being less competitive on the scale of creativity and quality. The truth is contrary to their belief: Bankim was the first graduate in British India and he knew English very well. It was a fashion for any writer those days, irrespective of his command over the language, to write in English. Bankim chose to write in an Indian language not because he failed in English but because of his conscience. I don't have to remind anyone that his poem Vande Mataram became a sort of national song sung by millions of people striving to get freedom from British rule.
The same is the story of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, who knew four or five European languages. He wrote in English in the beginning but ultimately shifted to his mother tongue, Bengali, in which he wrote his most popular work, Meghnad Badh. At one point in his life, Bankim Chandra as a novelist was compared with Walter Scott by English literary critics themselves. If you ask me, I personally feel that Bankim s novels are far superior to Scott's.
I can produce evidence that Bankim in his lifetime refused to get his work translated into English. He gave a damn for Western recognition. He didn t care about it.I wish Salman Rushdie and Khushwant Singh had read Bankim and Sarat Chandra before making comments on language writers.
Finally, I find this whole discussion about the millennium a little amateurish. Is the next millennium going to abruptly change styles, genre or art forms with its dawn on 1 January 2000?
Time has no beginning or end.
We human beings are tinier even than a bacterium in the Indian concept of time. We have our own lifespan; it s our own discovery, our own artificial creations of putting up signboards and placards like the century, decade or millennium.
In an attempt to measure time, we, in fact, locate our own existence in the vastness of time which is hardly even a fraction in the great ocean of Anaadi Ananta-Kaal.
I am more curious to understand what will be the future of literature in times to come. We had a great oral tradition for more than thousands of years. With the advent of the machine age, we shifted to the print medium a couple of hundred years ago.
Now we are in the audio-visual era. We feel its influences and pressures on written words. It is acting decisively over the reading habit and the book culture. And now there is the giant called the Internet. The future of the printed word is again in question. People talk about the extinction of the whole physicality of the print media with the advent of digital publishing. Before reacting to this, I want to understand this phenomenon of change first.
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