I remember when I first noticed this blog called Sepia Mutiny back in August 2004. Manish had linked to a blog post I had written on Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake on August 9; it was one of the site’s earliest posts.

The link was notable to me for two reasons. First, I was amused that Manish would write, “I normally wouldn’t point at a piece referencing Gayatri Spivak and other jargon-filled lit academics…” Ouch, is he talking about me? (Happily, eight years later we have Himanshu Suri and Das Racist, rapping about Arundhati Roy [rhymed with, of all things, "batty boy"!], “Gaya Spivak,” and the Slovenian philosopher Zizek. Jargon is in again, if these dudes have anything to say about it.)

Second, I was a little shocked at exactly how many people seemed to be clicking through. From the beginning, Sepia Mutiny was strikingly popular, so much so that for at least a few years it was routinely rated the most popular blog in India itself. Its success was certainly due to the mix of writers, which was a very talented and energetic pool (Manish alone was routinely putting up 5 or more posts a day).  But I think the site was also clearly filling a need online for discussion of Desi themed subjects, whether political (see Abhi’s early post about Dalip Singh Saund and the Democratic party), or more entertainment oriented (Kal Penn and Harold and Kumar were mentioned in the first week as well).

Even when it wasn’t always smooth-sailing within the circle of bloggers, and even when things were difficult for me in my real life outside of the blog, what always drew me to this site was its ‘sandbox’ quality — the idea that this mix of topics and themes ought to be linked. So when Abhi writes that it may be the blog has fulfilled its purpose in part I don’t agree: many of the difficult issues regarding identity, community, and culture South Asians were dealing with in 2004 remain unresolved. But I do agree that in a way the sandbox qualilty of this kind of group blog has for me at least come to seem a little less essential and exciting than it was at the beginning.

Yes, the South Asian American community is much more established than it once was. There’s Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal, there’s Aziz Ansari and Mindy Kaling, and there’s quite a number of first-rate writers (go Sugi!), filmmakers, and people in business, academia, and journalism. South Asian America is a big enough, and mainstream enough, world that it does seem a little forced to presume it all goes together anymore. (Though again, I don’t think that’s the same thing as saying we’re done thinking about or working on issues of identity. We’re not; I see that every day with my five year old son, as he tries to sort out his place in his school, and in American society more broadly. It looks to me like he’s going to have to go through a lot of the same stuff I went through growing up, all over again.)

At its height, from 2004 to about 2009 or so, Sepia Mutiny was the most active South Asian diaspora-oriented forum on the web. Posts on topics like M.I.A., Aishwariya Rai (aka TMBWITW), Bobby Jindal, and interracial dating would routinely draw 200, 300, sometimes even 1000 comments. And while we sometimes struggled to keep the comment threads troll-free and productive, we as bloggers could always count on interesting new voices to show up and make it feel worthwhile. Blogging on Sepia Mutiny was addictive for me (and I think not just me) during those years in large part because it was impossible not to be excited to encounter so many different perspectives and ideas.

South Asian vs. Indian. Sepia Mutiny was always somewhat divided over its function and focus. On the one hand, the directive from Abhi and the other founders was quite clear: the point was to create a space for a South Asian American perspective. The “South Asian” part was important and essential (and we had many fights, mainly with skeptical readers, about whether it wasn’t after all just an “Indian American” blog). Also important was the “American” part of the equation; Sepia Mutiny was never intended to be an “Indian subcontinent” forum.

Diaspora vs. Subcontinent. This policy of not focusing on South Asia itself was, however, always a challenge for me, since I have a deep personal and professional interest in what is happening in the subcontinent itself in terms of politics, culture, the media, and of course literature. And this past decade has been a really interesting one on all those fronts, from the debates over communalism and secularism (and we had many good arguments about those issues in the comments), to the rapid changes in the style of commercial Hindi cinema, to the debates about economic trends like outsourcing (i.e., Vinod on Obama in 2008) and globalization. Despite the blog’s stated policy of focusing exclusively on the diaspora, many of my colleagues at Sepia Mutiny joined me in posting frequently on these types of issues, leading to some very rich discussions. As I see it, the U.S. focus was a policy honored more in the breach than in the observance, and that’s a good thing.

First vs. Second/Third Generations. Another source of tension, not within the circle of Sepia Mutiny bloggers, but rather between bloggers and readers, was around generational issues. All of the original founders of the blog, I believe, were second generation Indian Americans (later Bangladeshi American, Pakistani American, and Sri Lankan American contributors would also join). However, many, if not most of the readership during the years I was involved seemed to consist of first generation immigrants (and many 1.5 generation folks — people who immigrated between age 5 and 15). This reflects the demographics of the South Asian American population — there are more first generation South Asian immigrants than second or third generation South Asian Americans in the United States. However, the fact that these readers were all interested in hearing about and talking about the same stuff underlines the commonalities between different generations of immigrants; our accents might not all be the same, but perhaps it’s not a great stretch to say that we do have some things in common.

Recent immigrants from South Asia might be interested in reading my post from 2005 about Katrina Kaif, but they might also be interested in hearing about Kal Penn, Aziz Ansari, or Padma Lakshmi. I think both bloggers and readers evolved quite a bit on this kind of issue over the years. In the beginning, first and second generation commenters used to make fun of each other as (“FOBs” or “ABCDs”, respectively), but somewhere along the line a more respectful and intelligent kind of conversation started to occur. The first generation scorn for ABCDs speaking Hindi badly started to lose its edge, while the second-generation’s dislike of the “awkward immigrant” stigma also evolved. In short, I think we all grew up, and started to appreciate and understand one another better.

My dream would have been a half diasporic, half “home” oriented blog; it was very nearly there for a little while. Luckily, there are fantastic new, highly professionalized blogs hosted by the New York Times (India Ink) and the Wall Street Journal, and they provide much of what used to be my Sepia Mutiny fix. I read them every day. And I get just a little smidgeon of what was once the excitement of the Sepia Mutiny comments on venues like Twitter (not so much, these days, from Facebook).

Finally, I should say that while the new social networking venues are helping to carry on the kinds of conversations that went on at Sepia Mutiny, they are a little lacking on some respects. For one thing, both Facebook and Twitter require super-compressed conversations. While it’s true we may have been a bit too long-winded in some blog posts over the years, I think there really is value in spelling out an idea or a perspective at some length, and then giving readers as much space as they want or need to discuss it with you. I don’t think I have ever changed my mind based on a discussion I had with someone on Twitter. But I did, often, in response to discussions on Sepia Mutiny.

I am not sure what the solution is. There’s no question that social networking is here to stay, but maybe as that ecosystem continues to evolve we can again find a space for long-form (but still immediate, and unfiltered) discussions of the issues that are on our minds.

And… I’m out.

But “write what you know” is also much, much harder than it might seem. At times, it can even feel like a chain around your neck — though that doesn’t mean you can just walk away from it. In his new novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing, Amitava Kumar acknowledges the problem directly in what might be my favorite line of the book: “If you could tell just any story you wanted, no demands ever needed to be made on your honesty.” [Another favorite line: "Bihari society was conservative; it was also corrupt, hollow to its core; you put a finger on its thin, distended skin and it split under your touch, revealing white worms"]

For Amitava Kumar, who was born and raised in Patna, in the Indian state of Bihar, it’s Bihar that encapsulates the memories and history that are what the author “knows,” and what he returns to (always slightly differently), in book after book. “Honesty” and “Bihar” live in the same site for Amitava, and yet the content of that Honesty — the Truth one seeks to represent — remains stubbornly elusive. Kumar’s recently-published novel Nobody Does the Right Thing, which was first published as Home Products in India in 2007, continues to develop this theme. It’s a terrific novel, which I think will be challenging to many readers in the Indian subcontinent as well as the West, but many of the elements that make it challenging are also what make it great. For the new Duke University Press edition of his novel, Amitava has produced a new edit of the book, and provided a little character guide to orient the reader, though he doesn’t give a glossary, italicize Hindi words, or back away from naming concrete aspects of the material world: specific towns and regions all over northern India, the names of prominent politicians or common points of historical reference, and so on. In one sense, Amitava’s novel might be seen as a translation of life in the Hindi belt to the medium of the English language, but it’s a translation that leaves a certain level of opacity intact. (Still, it’s not hard to put two and two together if you’re willing to try. Look it up, baby.)

Readers of this blog may already have somewhat of a sense of who Amitava Kumar is from the posts he has been putting up here in recent weeks, but I thought it might be helpful to briefly proffer my own re-introduction, as a long-time reader of Amitava’s works (he is also a personal friend).

Amitava Kumar has published close to a dozen books in a relatively short span of time, and is one of the most accomplished South Asian diaspora literary critics and journalists working today. I started hearing his name spoken of in awed tones by fellow-graduate students around 2000, the year he published Passport Photos, a breakthrough work that combined cultural criticism of the South Asian diaspora with literary theory, scraps of the author’s own poetry, political interventions, and autobiography. I also heard good things about his documentary about the Indian community in Trinidad, Pure Chutney (1998), though I didn’t end up seeing it until this summer. Another highly recommended early book is Bombay, London, New York (2002), which continues the trajectory set out by Passport Photos. There is a good deal we could say about these earlier books (as well as important collections and anthologies published more recently, such as World Bank Literature, and Away: the Indian Writer as Expatriate), but for now it might be sufficient to simply suggest that the ‘collage’ style of Kumar’s writing, the diverse range of subjects he considers, and the emphasis on immediacy and first-person involvement, ought to make his writing appealing to people who read blogs like this one. Kumar’s writing style was already somewhat “bloggy” even before the word “weblog” was coined.

As I understand it, Amitava was at work on this novel as early as 2004-2005, and published a longer version of Nobody Does the Right Thing in 2007 as Home Products — only in the Indian market. Amitava shopped around amongst U.S. publishers looking for a home, but only succeeded in finding one this year, with Duke University Press. His essay on what it was like to write the novel, “How to Write a Novel,” from conception to completion, might be inspiring to anyone who has had aspirations of publishing a novel themselves:

Amitava Kumar, How to Write a Novel

Amitava has also published a non-fiction work with Duke University Press this summer, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, which has been aptly reviewed by the website The Complete Review:

The Complete Review on A Foreigner…..

Also, see an excerpt from an early chapter, relating to the American government’s case against Hemant Lekhani, at Guernica magazine.

Amitava Kumar, Birth of a Salesaman

This is an important book in its own right — a must read for anyone who has had doubts about the “War on Terror,” as prosecuted either by the Governments of India or the United States. I won’t be reviewing that book here, however. (I may review it on my personal blog sometime soon.)

The Novel Itself:

Nobody Does the Right Thing is a story about a young journalist named Binod Singh, who sets out, on the encouragement of a movie-producer, to write a screenplay based on a true event that he hoped would make him famous. The story at issue relates to a teenage girl named Mala Srivastava who had had an affair with a Patna politician, only to be mysteriously murdered. After Binod published the article in an English-language, Bombay-based daily newspaper about the murdered young woman, he gets a call from a movie producer, who wants him to turn it into a film script. But he finds writing that script much more difficult than he would have expected; among other things, her family are extremely suspicious of him and uncooperative. Binod turns to his own family-members, who are themselves bit-players in Bihari politics, for help, but finds himself growing increasingly involved in his family’s story (which has its own bodies buried in various places), rather than the girl’s. Over time, his subject seems to shift, and he grows increasingly aware that keeping his finger on the “truth” of the matter is a challenging proposition. Finally, he has to decide whether he wants to stay committed to finding and recording the truth and remain somewhat marginal, or take a much easier path to success through the preparation of fanciful melodramas, for which there is always a ready audience in the Indian media-sphere.

Earlier I stated that I see this novel as an attempt at a “translation of life in the Hindi belt to the medium of the English language”; this is not a trivial part of what Amitava is up to here. This is a novel that pays quite close attention to the intricacies of language — the different registers of Hindi. It comes up again and again with Binod:

When he had come out of university, he wrote in both Hindi and English. He used to file all news reports in English, but his more reflective essays on Sunday were for the siter paper in Hindi. These essays were filled with nostalgia and protest, and reflected perhaps the loneliness he had felt while living away from home in Delhi.

[...] The essays appeared under the heading Aayeena, which means “mirror” in Hindi. After a few months of this, Binod’s editor told him that he needed to look in the mirror and decide what he wanted to be, a journalist in English or Hindi. The choice was easy. There were more readers for the Hindi papers but the money was in the English.

Nevertheless, while writing entirely in English, Binod found that he could not talk very easily about villages and small towns. He lacked the idiom to express his feelings directly about harvests or heavy rains that led to flooding, the excitement and then the numbing that followed the news of another caste massacre, the familiar bare roads that cut through fields and shone at night under the moon’s light, the sounds of a woman’s bangles coming across a pond in the dark. He wanted to talk about the routine of travel during Holi and Diwali in the unreserved compartment of third-rate trains like the Shram Jeevi Express — but who among the readers of English newspapers in Delhi would find any appeal in such things? There were only so many times that he could remind his reader that you could not understand the pain of the man who brought your milk or drove your car unless you too needed to go back to your village every six months to find out whether the child who had four milk teeth last time had now learned to call your name when shown your photograph. (9)

The idea that Binod’s writing in English feels somewhat disconnected rings true, from my experience reading of some of India’s English-language newspapers. (Amitava also hints that journalistic writing in the Indian media comes alive in a different way in print in Hindi and other Indian languages — though liveliness of the non-English presses can also pose some problems. Still, it’s worth remembering that the circulation of Hindi language newspapers in particular dwarfs that of English, even at a moment when people are alternately celebrating and bemoaning the rise of Global English.)

Interestingly, the issue of the relationship to English seems to be one moment in the novel where Amitava’s protagonist does not seem to be an autobiographical proxy. Though Amitava has himself come out of the Hindi belt to write exclusively in English, his own writing in English has never seemed to lack expressiveness or a sense of personal engagement.

I have described Nobody Does the Right Thing as a novel engaged in a kind of cultural translation of life in urban Bihar at the present moment in Hindi-inflected English. But one shouldn’t be confused by that description into thinking that the novel is some kind of 21st century sequel to Premchand’s Godaan. To get today’s Bihar right, you cannot merely write about shady small-town politics, farmers, and village caste grievances, and leave it at that. (Not that Godaan was limited to that either — in fact, even that village novel was cosmopolitan to a considerable extent.) Kumar’s characters in Patna in Nobody Does the Right Thing are deeply impacted by events around the world: 9/11, the war on terror, and Indian national politics (the setting is 2004, a national election year). And yet those broader events and crises do not seem to alter certain fundamental dynamics: a way of living, a culture, and a set of social relationships remains basically intact.

The novel also expresses a more than passing passion for Hindi films, both classic and contemporary. There is quite a bit of discussion of films, from Mother India and Do Bigha Zameen, to the films of the 2000s. Real Bollywood stars make cameos in the novel from time to time, and there is a definite awareness of the financial and cultural dynamics of the Bombay film world in the novel, including even a brief reference British woman writing a dissertation about Bombay cinema — a young woman to whom the stars seem to pay just a little too much attention.

Scattered through Kumar’s novel are some great meditations on the way commercial Hindi films work in everyday life in India’s small towns and villages. One of the characters in Kumar’s novel describes it as follows:

Small-town people tear their shirts open when they are felling very excited. They do that when a hit song is on the screen. When some titillating dance is going on, you see coins being thrown at the screen. It’s madness. They don’t hold back any emotion, they don’t care a damn what people think. If they want to cry, they cry or howl in the theater. In cities, audiences go to the theater with expectation, they come to enjoy the film and if you betray them, and you let them down and you can’t hold them, then you’ll see empty theaters the next day. They are extreme in their emotions; the city people aren’t–I would say they don’t know how to enjoy a Hiindi film.”

This is also a novel deeply engaged with British and American literature, and intellectual life. So Amitava also works in references to George Orwell (who was born in Bihar, though few people are aware of that fact), Jean-Paul Sartre, Tennessee Williams, and many others. In short, the characters in Kumar’s novel are pretty thoroughly cosmopolitan, without its characters ever having left India. (That said, it’s a somewhat different kind of comopolitanism than that expressed by the writers of the ‘Doon School Mafia’; the key difference here seems to be the closeness to Hindi, and the fact that the main characters remain regionally and ethno-linguistically marked.)

Finally, this is a novel that aims to reflect globalization, liberalization, and the revolution in everyday life brought about by the technological changes of the past two decades — from cell phones to the internet. The Starr Report makes an appearance — though in Kumar’s account it’s sold in bootleg Hindi translations as a pulpy paperback kind of pornography (with some completely fictional material by a translator inserted for ‘paisa vasool’). Along the same lines, one of the main characters runs a cybercafe in Patna that is busted for promoting obscenity, since its clients primarily use it to look at porn in closed cubicles (sometimes as couples). And the legacy of the Tehelka arms scandal — an internet era event, provoked by a website, rather than a conventional news source — is not far in the background either.

Revisiting the Authenticity Debate (briefly)

A couple of years ago, I contrasted Home Products to Aravind Adiga’s Booker-Prize winning novel, The White Tiger. Both are novels in English with protagonists who are from Bihar (though the state is not directly named in Adiga’s novel, the location is clearly implied). Both are also novels written by diasporic journalists who had been inspired by their journalistic work. I won’t rehash all of it all over again, though let me recommend an article Amitava himself wrote, mentioning The White Tiger as part of a survey of the “authenticity” debate in the Indian English novel.

Amitava Kumar, “Bad News: Authenticity and the South Asian Political Novel”

Amitava’s assessment lines up pretty closely with my own, though he goes in a somewhat different direction with his piece. For reference, one of my posts about Adiga’s novel is here:

Why I Didn’t Like The White Tiger

One could, of course, observe that it’s a little dangerous for one aspiring novelist to be dismissing another novelist’s work (with a superficially similar profile and theme), and to his credit Amitava readily acknowledges that potential conflict of interest in his essay, after quoting a slightly slapdash passage from Adiga’s novel on the relations between men and women in a Bihari village. Here is Kumar’s response to Adiga (for the passage in question, click on the first link above):

I have witnessed such men, and sometimes women, coming back to their village homes countless times. The novelist seems to know next to nothing about either the love or the despair of the people he writes about. I want to know if others, who might never have visited Bihar, read the passage above and recognize how wrong it is, how the appearance of verisimilitude belies the emotional truths of life in Bihar.

As I continued [to read Adiga's book], I found on nearly every page a familiar observation or a fine phrase, and on nearly every page inevitably something that sounds false. I stopped reading on page thirty-five.

I was anxious about my response to The White Tiger. No, not only for the suspicion about the ressentiment lurking in my breast, but also because I was aware that I might be open to the same charge of being inauthentic. My own novel Home Products, published last year, has as its protagonist a journalist who is writing about the murder of a young woman. The case is based on a well-known murder of a poet who had an illicit relationship with a married politician. Kidnapping and rape and, of course, murder, feature quite frequently in the novel’s pages. By presenting these events through a journalist’s eye, I tried hard to maintain a tone of observational integrity. At some level, realism had become my religion.

Incidentally, Amitava also spells out his dislikes in greater detail in an article in The Hindu from November 2008:

Amitava Kumar, “On Adiga’s The White Tiger”

Another way of making this complaint: Adiga’s novel claims to be a wake-up call to the “World is Flat”/”India Shining” triumphalists. But The White Tiger’s anti-elitist stance is more a rhetorical pose than anything else, not really borne out by any strong familiarity with the world it describes. The fact that it is a pose is not to say that it is entirely false. But it is considerably more limited; the book is more like an Op-Ed and less like a substantial portrait of a society.

Are there flaws with Nobody Does the Right Thing? Maybe. The condensed format of the American version of the novel has slightly reduced the amount of time we spend with each character, with the result being that we don’t have a very fully developed picture of some of the secondary characters in the book.

The novel also opens with an intriguing mystery regarding the murdered poetess Mala Srivastava, suggesting that it might turn out be a page turner. In fact, Nobody Does the Right Thing is more a reflective character study than a thriller, and readers looking for the excitements of a Stieg Larrson type book, full of clearly-delineated victims and scheming perpetrators, may be disappointed. Kumar’s world is much grayer, with a largely sympathetic blackmailer/pornographer in Binod’s cousin Rabinder.

Overall, Nobody Does the Right Thing should provoke a lively debate about life in contemporary India for readers — both those with personal connections to the Indian subcontinent and those who don’t know it very well. It has the ambitions and themes one sees in “big novels,” though it comes in a pretty modest package. It admittedly doesn’t give you a clean “takeaway” — a buzzword or easy moral that can become a Tweetable tagline (i.e., “All is well!”) — but then, that’s exactly the point.

Folks, this is my last post at Sepia Mutiny. It’s been a great five years that I’ve been involved with the site, and I continue to have great respect for the site and the bloggers here. However, it’s time for me to step away to pursue some other projects, on a somewhat smaller scale. If you’re interested in following my writing, you can find me at http://www.electrostani.com, and @electrostani at Twitter (http://twitter.com/electrostani).

Cheers!

For a little background on Hindi literature in the 20th century, you might start with Wikipedia; it’s not bad. The New Poetry movement came out of a general flowering of Hindi poetry from the early 20th century, a style of poetry known as Chhayavad (Shadowism). Mahadevi Verma is one of the best known writers in this style; another notable figure is Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Amitabh Bachchan’s father (and actually quite a good poet).

For me, the Chhayavad poetry sounds a little too pretty (“precious,” as they say in Creative Writing class), though I must admit that part of the problem is that I simply don’t have the Hindi vocabulary to be able to keep up with the language the Chhayavad poets tend to use. I prefer what came after, especially the New Poetry movement. The “New Poetry” style roughly resembles the modernism of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Hilda Doolittle in English literature. The language is stripped down and conversational, rather than lyrical. Some poets, like Kedarnath Singh, focus intently on conveying, with a kind of crystalline minimalism, pure images. Others are somewhat more conventional.

Below the fold, I’ll give some examples of a few favorite poems from the “New Poetry” movement, with several poems in both transliterated Hindi and English. [UPDATE: Look in the comments for three poems directly in Devanagari] My source today is mainly Lucy Rosenstein’s “New Poetry in Hindi”, which is available on Amazon for interested readers. (The nice thing about this volume is Rosenstein’s choice to print both the Hindi originals as well as her translations.)

In her introduction, Rosenstein describes how modern poetry in Hindi emerged after 1900, with Mahavirprasad Dwiwedi’s promotion of poetry in Khari Boli Hindi (earlier, poetry had mainly been written in Braj Bhasha). There was an early spurt of nationalist poetry, but, partially under the influence of English Romantic poetry (Wordsworth and Shelley), a movement calling itself “Chhayavad” emerged in the 1920s. Here is an example of a few lines in the Chhayavad style, from Sumitranandan Pant’s Almore ka vasant (Almora Spring):

Vidrum ou, markat kee chhaya,
Sone chaandee ka sooryatap;
Him parisal kee reshmee vaayu,
Shat ratnachhay kharg chitrit nabh!

Coral and emerald shade
sun’s heat first gold then silver;
snow mountain scent on silken breezes,
a hundred jeweled brids painting the sky
(Translated David Rubin)

It may be that my own limited Hindi renders poems like this somewhat inaccessible, at least in the original. More generally, operating from the translation, I put poems like this under “sounds pretty, but…” (That’s my personal taste. I have friends who love writers like Pant and Mahadevi.)

After the Chhayavad movement, the dominant stream in Hindi poetry seemed to split into two in the 1930s, with Progressives in one camp (Pragativad), and Experimentalists in the other (Prayogvad).

Progressive Poetry was part of a major movement in Indian literature that began in the 1930s. This movement is usually called the Progressive Writers Movement, and it had major literary communities in fiction, drama, as well as poetry; it also had offshoots in many different South Asian languages (earlier I have written about some Urdu writers loosely affiliated with the Progressive Writers, Sa’adat Hasan Manto, and Ismat Chughtai). As the name indicates, this was writing largely motivated by a desire to make a political intervention. A fair amount of the writing was anti-colonial, and much of it was oriented to social and economic reforms within Indian society.

Just after the Progressive trend in poetry began in the 1930s, a much smaller group of Hindi writers initiated a new, experimentalist style. Much of this writing avoided big political themes in favor of more abstract meditations. (Importantly, many of the writers in this movement overlapped with the Progressive Writers, and some were card-carrying political activists (i.e., communists). They simply didn’t bring themes from the political world into their writing.

Initially the movement was spearheaded by Agyeya (also sometimes spelled Ajneya in English; his real name was Sacchidananda Hirananda Vatsayan), beginning with an anthology called Tar Saptak, in 1943.

Agyeya (whose pen-name literally means “Unknowable”) is a really interesting character. He was educated at home initially, as his father didn’t believe in formal schooling, though he did go on to get a Bachelors of Science at a British college. He also started an M.A. in English, but didn’t finish, after he got involved in the independence movement. According to Rosenstein, Agyeya spent three years in jail (1931-1934), which proved decisive in terms of his development as a poet. He was a mass of contradictions – widely recognized as an activist and political leader, Agyeya was also deeply solitary in some ways. Raised as a traditional Brahmin, he also exemplified modernism in his intellectual and literary output.

Here is an example of Agyeya’s poetry, in the Experimental (“New Poetry”) style:

Chup-Chap

Chup-Chap Chup-Chap
Jharne ka svar
Ham mei bhar jay,
Chup Chap Chup Chap
Sharad kee chaandnee
Jheel kee lahro par tir aay,

Chup-chap chup-chap
Jeevan kaa rahsya
Jo kahaa na jay, hamaaree
THahree aankho me gaharaay,
Chup chap chup chap
Ham pulkit viraad me Dubei
Par viraad hm mei mil jay

Chup Chap Chup Cha … ap

Quietly

Quietly
May the murmur of water falling
Fill us,

Quietly
May the autumn moon
Float on the ripples of the lake,

Quietly
May life’s unspoken mystery
Deepen in our still eyes,

Quietly
May we, ecstatic, be immersed in the expanse
Yet find it in ourselves

Quiet … ly …
(translated by Lucy Rosenstein)

Another favorite New Poetry writer is Raghuvir Sahay, who came of age a generation after Agyeya.

Here is an example of a Raghuvir Sahay poem I really like:

Aaj Phir

Aaj phir shuroo jeevan.
Aaj meine eik chhoTee-see saral-see kavitaa paDee.
Aaj meine sooraj ko Dubte der tak dekhaa.
Aaj meine sheetal jal se jee bhar snan kiya.
Aaj eik chhoTee-see bachchee aayee, kilak mere kanDhe chaDee
Aaj meine aadi se ant tak eik poora gaan kiya.
Aaj jeevan phir shuroo huaa.

Today Anew
Today life started anew.
Today I read a short, simple poem.
Today I watched the sun set for a long time.
Today I bathed to my heart’s content in cool water.
Today a little girl came and shouting with delight climbed onto my shoulders.
Today I sang a whole song, from beginning to end.
Life started anew today.
(Translated Lucy Rosenstein)

Another poem in Rosenstein’s collection that clicked with me is by Shakunt Mathur, one of the leading female lights of the Experimental/New Poetry movement.

For now, I’ll just post Rosenstein’s English translation of a Mathur poem:

You should be beautiful, the house should be beautiful

When I return home tired you should be beautiful, the house should be beautiful
Even if all day sweat poured
However many clothes you sewed
Even if the child doesn’t yield
And the potato is half-unpeeled

When I return home tired you should be beautiful, the house should be beautiful
All storms in the house should be stilled
You should look at me with eyes filled
Without flowers in your hair,
Showy clothes, flirtatious air

When I return home tired you should be beautiful, the house should be beautiful
Reclining on the sofa,
You should be reading a foreign journal
The house should shine like crystal
My steps’ sound should startle you

Don’t write poetry, beauty, I am enough, you are loved
When I return home tired you should be beautiful, the house should be beautiful.

(I can post the Hindi if there is interest.)

Clearly a feminist sensibility! Incidentally, in Hindi some of the lines rhyme, which Rosenstein reproduces in her translation. The language is simple but elegant and the picture she’s painting seems true – and this combination is what I like most about the “New Poetry.”

Finally, here is Vinay Dharwadker’s translation of Kedarnath Singh’s “On Reading a Love Poem”. This poem isn’t included in Rosenstein’s volume, though several other wonderful Kedarnath Singh poems are in her collection.

Kedarnath Singh (b. 1934): ON READING A LOVE POEM

When I’d read that long love poem
I closed the book and asked —
Where are the ducks?

I was surprised that they were nowhere
even far into the distance

It was in the third line of the poem
or perhaps the fifth
that I first felt
there might be ducks here somewhere

I’d heard the flap flap of their wings
but that may have been my illusion

I don’t know for how long
that woman
had been standing in the twelfth line
waiting for a bus

The poem was completely silent
about where she wanted to go
only a little sunshine
sifted from the seventeenth floor
was falling on her shoulders

The woman was happy
at least there was nothing in her face to suggest
that by the time she reached the twenty-first line
she’d disappear completely
like every other woman

There were _sakhu trees
standing where the next line began
the trees were spreading
a strange dread through the poem

Every line that came next
was a deep disturbing fear and doubt
about every subsequent line
If only I’d remembered–
it was in the nineteenth line
that the woman was slicing potatoes
She was slicing
large round brown potatoes
inside the poem
and the poem was becoming
more and more silent
more solid

I think it was the smell
of freshly chopped vegetables
that kept the woman alive
for the next several lines

By the time I got to the twenty-second line
I felt that the poem was changing its location
like a speeding bullet
the poem had whizzed over the woman’s shoulder
towards the sakhu trees

There were no lines after that
there were no more words in the poem
there was only the woman
there were only
her shoulders her back
her voice–
there was only the woman
standing whole outside the poem now
and breaking it to pieces

(translated by Vinay Dharwadker) [SOURCE]

I hope you enjoyed at least some of those poems.

Watching the film, one thing that struck me was the similarity of one of the key monsoon songs to “Ghanan Ghanan” from Lagaan. Here is Hariyala Sawan Dhol Bjata Aya:

And here is Ghanan Ghanan:

There are similarities both in the structure of the songs and in the way the songs are filmed. Did A.R. Rahman or Ashutosh Gowariker acknowledge the debt to Bimal Roy after Lagaan came out? (They might have — I might not have been paying attention.)

The blog Dusted Off has a great list of “Top Ten Monsoon Songs”: here.

And one of the commenters on that post links to his own “105 Baarish Songs”: here.

As many people may have heard, Nikki Haley came out with a commanding lead in the South Carolina governor’s primary last night (49% to 22% for the second place finisher), though she was just shy of enough votes to avoid a runoff. I thought some of the quotes in the New York Times’ article about it speak to some of the issues that Ennis raised last week:

If she wins the general election in November, Ms. Haley would be the first woman and first racial minority elected governor of South Carolina. In a speech to supporters on Tuesday night, Ms. Haley said she has challenged the status quo — but less through her age, race or gender, and more through her political views. (link)

At first that might not be so surprising, but consider this: South Carolina is 30% African American.

But in terms of her personal upbringing, Ms. Haley is without precedent for South Carolina. The state has the lowest percentage of women elected to office of any state in America. And Ms. Haley is the only Indian-American elected official in the state. (link)

While the “raghead” comment was disgusting, the fact that she’s a woman has also been a huge factor in the campaign, with two men, both political operatives, claiming to have had affairs with her.

Sometimes American politics is maddening. But sometimes a certain passion for fair play asserts itself:

“It has become a referendum on whether you think she was treated fairly,” said Danielle Vinson, the chairwoman of the political science department at Furman University in Greenville, S.C. Indeed, Sonny Hulon, 74, a retired grocery store employee who was voting at a senior citizen center in Columbia, said he had changed his support to Ms. Haley. “I voted for the lady,” he said, referring to Ms. Haley. “I was going to vote for McMaster but I didn’t like all of the junk that the other campaigns were saying about the lady.”

Allen Cuthrell, 52, an electrical engineer from Greenville, said he thinks the attacks benefitted Ms. Haley, whom he supports. “It exposed the good old boy machine,” he said. “People didn’t realize how bad it was until they saw Nikki getting attacked.” (link)

I like that: “I voted for the lady.” It’s interesting that he doesn’t say her name. And there are similar kinds of quotes in the Washington Post’s coverage.

Nikki Haley’s political views are not my own. But it is impressive that she has withstood these attacks, and even — improbably — benefited from them.

I saw one of the attackers as he was entering the sermon hall, then I ran away. He very much reminded me of the people who attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team, he was wearing similar clothes – the traditional Pakistani dress shalwar kameez and he looked like someone from a tribal area.

I went upstairs and I found a room with a bed, I hid under the bed. I was too scared to leave, even after the firing had stopped. I saw from the window security personnel, rescue people, fire brigade. The bodies had already been taken away.

This is a big old building, it’s 50 years old. I was on my own. I didn’t know what was happening. I could hear the firing going on for quite some time.

I am not surprised by this attack. We were expecting it for three or four weeks – a threat was published in a local newspaper that there would be attacks and the authorities were informed.

That’s why we have our own security guards in front of our mosques. They are not professional, they are volunteers. They were the first to have been killed. (link)

That last detail is distressing: there were specific warnings published in a local newspaper? And the authorities still didn’t see fit to send in police to guard the mosques? Granted, if these guys were anything like the militants in the Mumbai attacks, even armed police may not have posed a significant deterrant. But still: it seems like a malicious kind of negligence to have left these folks to fend for themselves.

This tragedy is part of a long history for the Ahmadiyyas in Pakistan, who form a minority community of about 4 million (many Ahmadiyyas have left Pakistan since the 1970s). Wikipedia describes how the sect was declared to be non-Muslim, and effectively disenfranchised through a series of ordinances, starting in the 1970s. More details about the history of Ahmadi political agitation in Pakistan can be found here (Musharraf initially aimed to counter some of the discriminatory laws targeting Ahmadis, and effectively ended the ban on Ahmadis voting in elections in 2002). Finally, UNHCR has a limited timeline concerning political agitation involving the Ahmadis here.

It should also be noted that there was a serious Maoist attack in West Bengal, India today as well — leaving more than 70 dead as a derailed passenger train was struck by an oncoming cargo train. See a BBC account by Soutik Biswas here. The sense I’m getting is that the sabotage that caused the derailment itself was relatively minor, and might have led to minimal casualties; the event that has caused the high body count was the secondary collision.

For Hirschberg, the high point in terms of subversive M.I.A. performances was the Grammys in 2009, when M.I.A. appeared on stage with four male rap stars, nine months pregnant. Apparently her contractions started while on stage! But Hirschberg also has some pointed comments on some of M.I.A.’s recent work, including the strange (I thought, awful) video to “Born Free.” Here is Hirschberg’s account of it:

Unlike, say, her performance at the Grammys, which was a perfect fusion of spectacle (a nine-months-pregnant woman rapping in a see-through dress) with content (Maya’s fervor was linked to the music), the video for “Born Free” feels exploitative and hollow. Seemingly designed to be banned on YouTube, which it was instantly, the video is set in Los Angeles where a vague but apparently American militia forcibly search out red-headed men and one particularly beautiful red-headed child. The gingers, as Maya called them, using British slang, are taken to the desert, where they are beaten and killed. The first to die is the child, who is shot in the head. While “Born Free” is heard in the background throughout, the song is lost in the carnage. As a meditation on prejudice and senseless persecution, the video is, at best, politically naïve. (link)

I’m not so much interested in M.I.A’s particular politics, which I’ve disagreed with in the past. Yes, she has a very emotional, oversimplified account of recent events in Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers in particular — let’s not have that fight again.

I’m more wondering what kind of image of the artist and performer we get from this article. Does M.I.A. really know what she’s doing? She’s had an album that was a big Indie hit (“Arular”), and one major commercial success, with “Paper Planes,” (off “Kala”); and there were several other solid, highly creative tracks off that second album. Given how important her producers are in her creative process, is it even fair to say that she’s at the helm of her own ship? Do you think she’s due for another success with her upcoming third album, or is her current direction a musical misfire, born of too much self-indulgence?

Finally, what did readers think of the second single off the as-yet unreleased new album, XXXO?

I haven’t followed the week-to-week developments since then terribly closely, but several recent developments were mentioned in a thought-provoking Op-Ed by Bishop Desmond Tutu and Lakhdar Brahimi in the Guardian yesterday. There is some good news overall, as the peace has held, but Tutu and Brahimi also acknowledge that progress towards rebuilding the affected parts of northern Sri Lanka, and the broader project of healing and reintegration, has been painfully slow. Here are the specific things Tutu and Brahimi want to see the government do:

Respect for minorities, human rights and the rule of law must be centre stage in Sri Lanka’s future. The worsening conflict saw limitations imposed on civil liberties and democratic institutions. The recent relaxation of emergency laws and the promised presidential pardon for Tamil journalist JS Tissainayagam are welcome, but they are only a start. Real change must begin with repealing the state of emergency and re-establishing the constitutional council.

All displaced civilians should be helped to return home. Those suspected of being fighters must be treated humanely with full regard to international law.

[...] There is a growing body of evidence that there were repeated and intentional violations of international humanitarian law by both the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tamil Tigers) in the last months of the war.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s decision earlier this month to appoint a commission on lessons learnt and reconciliation is a step in the right direction but not nearly enough. There is no indication, as yet, that the commission intends to hold anyone to account for any violations of domestic or international law. (link)

The particular development that stands out here is Rajapaksa’s decision to create a South Africa (and Rwanda) style Truth and Reconciliation Committee to deal with human rights violations on both sides. On the one hand, this seems like a good thing, since up until now the Sri Lankan government seemed very reluctant to even acknowledge the possibility of any military misdeeds.

But there is also a problem — unlike in South Africa and Rwanda, where the Truth commissions were established by new governments to deal with the violence associated with previous regimes, in Sri Lanka the government has not changed. In order to ensure that witnesses from both sides feel safe coming forward, Tutu and Brahimi advocate a different approach to establish a reckoning — an independent, international committee.

I hope this process does move forward somehow. Rebuilding people’s homes and putting a new economic infrastructure has to be the first priority (and even there, it appears the government has lagged, despite significant infusions of foreign aid to help rebuild the north). But the longer-term project has to include some sort of credible reckoning: of the numbers of deaths, of specific crimes and atrocities, and admissions of responsibility (even if no criminal punishments are involved). If you don’t make efforts to confront the legacy of violence and, establish a shared baseline for the truth of what happened, the sense of bitterness and rupture people feel won’t begin to heal.

Since a lot of our discussion last year involved the Tamil Diaspora’s anguish about the way the war was concluded, it might also be worth noting that getting into these matters is especially important to address the concerns of that community.

I’m leaning towards “not,” though I could still be persuaded, if they get past the “Man-meat” jokes… I think their idea is to make fun of kitschy Americana and get traction on the culture-clash (which means a certain amount of stereotype humor). What do readers think?

I just wanted to put in my own two-cents’ worth: I support the decision made by Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood to accept the prize. In contrast to many of my colleagues who signed the recent open letter to Ghosh, I do not think there was anything to be gained by boycotting a cultural prize given by an institution outside of the Israeli government. Far better to stay, to continue to engage, and to dissent where necessary.

A viable argument against “cultural” boycotts is that they simply don’t do anything, though defenders of the practice might say that the symbolic value and media coverage is worth it. (Note that I’m not talking about economic boycotts, which may be more effective.) Ghosh himself points out that in writing In an Antique Land, he worked with Israeli as well as Arab academics to learn the written language (Judeo-Arabic) used by Abraham Ben-Yiju; a boycott would have made that project impossible. Similarly, this kind of cultural boycott would also lead us to be unable to engage with dissenting Israeli cultural expression, such as the recent film Waltz With Bashir.

But for me the most compelling argument against this way of reacting to Israeli cultural institutions is that, as bad as things are for the Palestinians, what the U.S. itself has engaged in over the past decade — especially the debacle of an unjustifiable and badly executed war in Iraq — is far worse. By any reasonable standard, if we’re boycotting Israel, we should be boycotting ourselves! (And similar kind of accusations could be made against India or Pakistan, for any number of reasons.) In short, this kind of thing doesn’t get us anywhere. Structurally, if we pay taxes and receive benefits from a government, we are all “complicit” in what that government does. Ghosh and Atwood expressed their dissenting views with the current situation in Israel in their acceptance speech on May 9. Here is an excerpt from the speech:

MARGARET: Propaganda deals in absolutes: in Yes and No. But the novel is a creature of nuance: of perhaps, of maybe. It concerns itself, not with gods and demons, but with mortal people, with their flawed characters, their unsatisfactory bodies, their sufferings, their limited and often wrong choices; with the dubiousness of their own actions and the unfairness of their fates.

AMITAV: Writing a novel often requires you to see life through the eyes of those you may not agree with. It is a polyphonic form. It pleads for the complex humanity of all human beings.

Yes. Later they went on to acknowledge the untenable treatment of the Palestinians, and express support for the current round of talks led by George Mitchell. Isn’t it more effective to go to Tel Aviv and talk about the “unequal, unjust, and harsh and dangerous conditions of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories,” than it would be to stay home in Park Slope, and write articles denouncing Israel for Counterpunch?

Ghosh explains his attitude towards the disinvestment movement on Margaret Atwood’s blog in a longer statement, here. There is also a discussion of Ghosh’s approach at Kafila, here, with most voices coming out against Ghosh. And here is a little coverage of the acceptance speech in Tel Aviv from Rediff.