Over the top

by Guest Blogger Diwas Kc

During a tribute to Faiz Ahmed Faiz hosted by his daughter Salima Hashmi, poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar was invited on stage to share his first encounter with the Pakistani ace. Below you can hear Akhtar reminisce endearingly of a small thrill experienced during a constricted period of India’s history and an unhappy stage of Akhtar’s own career.

[audio:http://himalmag.com/blogs/files/2010/01/Akhtar-Faiz.mp3|titles=Akhtar-Faiz]

For other blogs from the Jaipur Literature Festival, go here.

by Guest Blogger Sushma Joshi

Why are people willing to trade freedom for prosperity and material comfort, asked John Kampfner. His book, Freedom for Sale, looks at eight countries as examples of places which have traded in freedom for material security and prosperity. He was born in Singapore and lived in China and Russia—where except for a group of “fearless troublemakers,” most people have bowed down to the imperatives of prosperity in exchange for public freedoms. The UAE and Dubai have a Disney quality about them, says Kampfner, where everyone is trading freedoms for other things, including slave labor. In India, pollution is the tradeoff, while in Italy, Berlosconi has dismantled the independent judiciary and media. In the UK, the ascent of the Left has dismantled civil liberties, and in the USA, self-censorship after 2001 is at an all time high, with people trading in public freedoms for public security.

Niall Ferguson tried to play the Oxford don and questioned Kampfner about his assumptions. Ferguson brought up Tocqueville. He said that there was a tradeoff between liberty and equality. He talked about totalitarianism. The Oxford questioning (in a nutshell, he said that some freedoms had to be given up for material prosperity, and that material prosperity in turn brought freedom) brought forth quick retorts from the author, who pointed out that his questioner didn’t seem to have read the book. “I am not talking about totalitarian regimes—North Korea, etc. I am talking about liberal democracies. When a government says: we need to do whatever must be done to protect you, that’s fishy,” he said.

Steve Coll, jumping in this fray, said that one freedom he was glad of was the freedom from an Oxford education! The middle class is always trying to protect itself, he said. He said he was recently in Saudi Arabia, a place with no culture of public freedom, no free press, no human rights organizations, no tenured professors, and no Constitution other than the Koran. Even though people were consigned to these private spaces, they still talked about public freedoms because the discourse of it was global, and it was everywhere. In the USA, private security took over public freedoms after 9/11, he said. Americans were deeply frightened. Like India, Americans are now learning to deal with the notion of persistent terrorism, he said. Despite everything, there is a pervasive culture of redress in places like India—people speak out fearlessly even when the state is murdering its own citizens. In the USA, people don’t challenge the state as much as in India, he said.

Tarun Tejpal of Tehelka concluded the session by saying that “India needs a lot of activism on the part of its elites. I’m agnostic, but I was born a Hindu, and philosophically we have to do what has to be done. India has a social contract but it’s still a country in progress. The promise of democracy still has to be delivered.”

Sushma Joshi blogs at www.sushma.blogspot.com andwww.sushmasfiction.blogspot.com. For other blogs from the Jaipur Literature Festival, go here.

–Guest Blogger Diwas Kc

Here’s a poem on another pair of neighbours: Dalit and Thakur. This is a poem by Omprakash Valmiki, a Hindi Dalit poet, and translated by Naresh K. Jain. Valmiki delivered this poem at one session of Bhaskar Bhasha Series at Jaipur Literature Festival. Look below for the recital in Hindi.

Thakur’s Well

The hearth is made of soil,
the soil is from the pond,
the pond belongs to the Thakur.

Hunger demands rotis,
the rotis are made of bajra,
bajra comes from the field,

the field belongs to the Thakur.
The ox belongs to the Thakur,

the plough belongs to the Thakur.

The hand that grips the handle is our own.

The harvest belongs to the Thakur,
the well belongs to the Thakur,
the water belongs to the Thakur,
the farm belongs to the Thakur,
the lane and the streets belongs to the Thakur.

What then is ours?
The village, the city, the country?

[audio:http://himalmag.com/blogs/files/2010/01/Valmiki.mp3|titles=Valmiki]

–By Guest Blogger Diwas Kc

As a visitor from Nepal, I am sometimes baffled by the optimism and sense of progress at the Jaipur Literature Festival. There is more to it than the congenial, celebratory sort of affair that is ordinary to festivals. Somehow to me the euphoria here appears directly connected to the wretchedness I hear expressed often in Kathmandu.

There is neighbourly feeling at the festival – a gathering of intellectuals from various parts of the world, sharing their worlds, getting to know each other. There is, in other words, an air of tolerance and empathy. But I also feel sneaking in me the other neighbourly feelings: envy and annoyance. Experiencing this neighbour country through the exhilaration of this festival tends to nag and disturb me. It has a way of underscoring exactly those moods and modes of life – the various walls of economic and cultural circumstances – that broadly separate India from my home country. These differences are what I frequently find myself pondering about here in Jaipur.

These differences though, I have come to realize, are the results not of great disparities but in fact of unalterable closeness. This is an epiphany I reached here at the festival at one of Gulzar sahab’s Hindustani poetry recitals during which I sat moved profoundly. Distance that arises from too much proximity, strangeness that results from familiarity – these are themes that play out remarkably in some of Gulzar’s poems and which I find so appropriate to my own thoughts on Nepal and India. I am daring below to rise above my station and offer a meager translation of one of his poems, whose title I do not know but which I have called “Neighbour”.

NEIGHBOUR

As long as there is light in the house across from mine
the shadow of that house creeps on the wall of my room.
One wheelchair gets shoved left and right, it keeps turning.
When the pet birds of that house fight, they collide against my wall.
A cage hanging in that house now looks like a cage in my house, one window shuts close and its mesh casts a prison door on my wall.
Now everyone who passes by seems like a prisoner to me.
A naked, suspended bulb sometimes rocks back and forth
and the people start flying around in the air, like in a circus.
After some while the window is open once again. A light is on.
Two swaying shadows in embrace come to stillness on the balcony.
Perhaps they are looking at my courtyard.
Sometimes the smoke of that house makes a shadow on my wall.
Then it feels as if both houses are on fire.

Gulzar in Jaipur has left me with the two sides of neighborliness – intimacy and intrusion.

Gulzar’s ‘Neighbor’ –Link to the audio of the Hindi version of ‘Neighbour’

[Editor:  For poetry from another neighbor see Bol! Bol! Bol! from our archives]

For other blogs from the Jaipur Literature Festival, go here.

–Guest Blogger Sushma Joshi

Kancha Iiliah, writer of “Why I am not a Hindu,” talks about how Dalits are not just outcastes, they are “outwriters.” Their literature is not seen to be valid, people are not interested to read what they write. People ask and say: Can there be such a thing as Dalit literature? If there can be Vedic literature, and Bhakti literature, and Marxist literature, and Gandhian literature, why can’t there be Dalit literature, asks Iiliah.

Om Prakash Valmiki also picks up on the same thread: “We are not Hindus, we are Dalits.” The violence still faced by the majority of Dalits in India and other parts of the subcontinent is directly caused by Hindu thought. God cannot be touched by the untouchables in Hinduism, and this, says Kancha Iiliah, is spiritual fascism.

From the Current issue: L. Brueck on Dalit Literature

Art by Rumen Dragostinov

P.Sivakami, a Dalit female writer who shook up her community with her critiques of patriarchy within the Dalit community in her book The Grip of Change, talked about one incident in which she was in charge of distributing bicycles to Dalit schoolgirls. The girls chosen, the government bureaucrats exclaimed, couldn’t be Dalits—because they were too beautiful. What they meant, explained P. Sivakami, is that they expected girls who were poor, malnourished and ill-dressed.

Iiliah couldn’t resist taking a dig at S Anand, the khadi-dressed organizer of the panel—and a Brahmin. “Look at him, he’s still wearing Hindu clothes while we wear these suits that Ambedkar told us to,” he joked. “Give me your coat!” responded S Anand, pulling at Iliah’s coat in mock dismay. Illiah also points out that caste has a distinct racial history. “Why do you think he looks like this, and we look like this?” he asks. After a bit of discussion, the panel agrees that caste has become pretty mixed up and there is no longer any racial purity left–however, discrimination is still deeply entrenched. “A group of Dalits changed their names and started to use Sharma,” said Valmiki. “And now the Brahmins in that area no longer use Sharma.”

“How can you people be so backward,” exclaimed one foreign-returned Indian, who cited South Africa and his puzzlement that Indians were apparently the only people in the world still practicing such racial apartheid. Of course, this enlightened gentleman’s observation immediately brought to the room the sense that the Dalit case was not unique–indeed, racial and religious discrimination still existed all over the world still.

Next out in the front lawn, Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize winning author from Nigeria, gave a beautiful rendering of a praise song. “Praise songs are meant to be hypnotic and mesmerizing,” he said. “Sometimes people who return from foreign countries and hear praise songs of their lineages and they become dizzy. You feel your head expanding.” I for one had to press down on the top of my head for a few seconds to make sure nothing was exploding out of there after that mesmerizing moment. Wole explained that he had staged a play with a praise song and certain suggestible actors had to be asked to leave since the drumming, the incantation and all the other powerful forces was getting too much for them and they were getting into a trance. It was better, he explained, that they be off the stage. The oral storytelling power that Wole brought to his reading, the sense of a griot out on the podium hypnotizing the crowd with metaphors of the road, the search, the constant dissatisfaction…It was almost as if, like a line in his poetry, that “strange voices were guiding my feet” and the horseman galloped on to a new sense of being as I listened to him read.

Wole Soyinka, asked about the religious conflicts in his country, said: “This is a virus.And it has spread all over the world.” Two hundred people died recently, he said, in one of these incidents. He grew up, he said, listening to church bells next to the muezzin’s call for prayer. Muslims sent over meat to their neighbors on Ramadan, and the Christians sent over rice and other gifts on Christmas. “I’m right, you’re wrong has now become I’m right, you’re dead,” he said dryly. He sounded bewildered, a little bit, that those tolerant times seem to be past.

Soyinka then talked about his year of solitary confinement, and how he used bones to make pens, and coffee as ink, to write poetry in the margins of books people brought in for him and then smuggled out. “I believe in forgiveness and reconciliation,” he said. “But sometimes you have to be careful since these people are incorrigible, and you can’t be too forgiving. But most of all, I believe in restitution.”

An audience member, responding to his beautiful rendition of a poem in Yoruba, asked him: How do you maintain your Yoruba identity in this age of contamination?  “You must maintain a core identity even in a contaminated world,” said Soyinka.

In the Mughal Tent, Isabel Hilton and Tenzing Tsundue debated another fragment of the global story on how to hold on to an identity in another kind of pulverizing force—a nation state intent on wiping out the identity of a people. Hilton talks about Tibetan nomads who are being resettled in barracks in the middle of the desert, with no work. They are given some compensation which they finish within the year. Then they are stuck there, with no work. Herding has been made illegal, and not just a way of life could be gone. Tibetan nomads are to be “settled” within the next two years. “It could be too late very soon,” she says. There is silence in the audience as we digest this.

“How can Obama dare to give our country away?” Asks Tsundue, who has just been asked by William Dalrymple, moderator, about that famous President’s statement that Tibet will always be part of the Republic of China. “What right does he have?”

Hilton had different views. Since China will never give up Tibet due to its strategic location, its water resources, and the sense of it being a part of larger China, she said, it may be more practical to think about ways in which Tibetans can have an easier life, and how their way of life can survive, in this reality [See The new relationship in Himal December 2009 for the evolving political relationship to Tibet in the region]. This is what we should be negotiating about, she said. “The Chinese government is not a monolith,” she said. “As somebody said, government is often a big issue run by little people.”

Tsundue, with the undying hope of the exile, didn’t agree. “Freedom cannot be given: it has to be taken,” he said simply. “It has to be worked at. It is not what China will give or not give. They will leave when their interests are exhausted.”

“It is very dangerous for Tibet,” Isabel Hilton said, “To see the Dalai Lama as the embodiment of Tibet. After his death, there will be a big void. We need more secular voices. Where is the cultural Tibet–the writers, artists and thinkers? We need to work to create a new cultural idea of Tibet.”

And this, perhaps may have been the food for thought for today—that all the discrimination faced by Dalits, all the religious terror wrought on minorities in Nigeria, all the persecution faced by Tibetans–all of this could perhaps be moderated, perhaps even shifted to another level, by bringing down the religious volume and putting more secular voices on the dias. And by creating new cultural identities of what it means to be a Dalit or a Bhramin, a Nigerian Christian or Nigerian Muslim, or a Chinese or a Tibetan of the twenty-first century.

Sushma’s previous posts from the Jaipur Literature Festival is here and an archive of all our bloggers’ post to the event is here.